Father Mine - Ficlets
by myinnerchildisbored
Summary: Snack fiction - sweet, sour, savoury...all sorts - featuring Sherlock, John, Mycroft... and the irrepressible Miss Thea. Follows (and may precede) 'Project Progeny'. Suggestions welcome. Parentlock
1. Assistance

Term break was looming large. Lisa and her parents were off on some epic tour of France and Italy, Marcus was being flown to the States for an involuntary job

experience placement with some fancy high-tech start-up-god-knew-what. Thea figured it was a no-hold-barred attempt to keep him from getting stoned and

going out to gigs for two weeks straight, his parents had been getting a little narky of late. So while Lisa cheerfully careened across the channel and Marcus

was forcibly bundled into an airplane, Thea sat on the windowsill and looked out at Baker Street somewhat dejectedly.

"Only the stupid are bored in their own company."

She turned her head to shoot her father a half-hearted glare.

"You're constantly bored," she pointed out.

Sherlock was holding a severed toe, impaled on a long metal skewer, using a paintbrush to carefully coat it in clear paste.

"Thankfully, we have it on good authority that I'm a rubbish role model." Sherlock put down the paint brush, selected a tiny blow torch from the mayhem on the

table and set the toe on fire. It went up like a piece of paper and within seconds a charred bone clattered to the kitchen floor.

"Whoa!" Thea jumped off the sill and ambled into the kitchen. "Can I do one?"

"Are you capable of asking properly?"

" _May_ I do one?"

"I suppose."

The soup bowl on the kitchen table was about half full of detached digits. Thea retrieved her gloves and goggles from the drawer next to the sink and picked

out a middle finger with long finger nail varnished in sparkly green nail polish. She took a skewer from the sink and slowly worked the finger onto it, taking care

not to break the skin. It was a little tricky, there was almost no meat on the finger.

"What is that?" she asked, nodding towards the container of paste.

"Pyro-exhilarant." Her father handed her the paint brush.

"Is this about the maniac setting homeless people on fire?" As she started coating the finger, Thea flashed back to colouring Easter eggs in primary school.

"Ahm…yes," Sherlock said cautiously.

"It's all over the news," Thea said, anticipating his next question. "Anyone we know?"

"Not thus far."

"Would you tell me if it was?" The finger was now covered and glistening, giving off a faint aroma of sulphur. "Someone we know, I mean."

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because death upsets you."

Thea scowled.

"Fair enough, dead people and pieces of them don't seem to have adverse effects," her father conceded. "But death itself would be jarring."

"It doesn't upset you?" Thea challenged.

"No use getting worked up over the inevitable." Sherlock took the blowtorch and adjusted its setting before handing it to her. "Caring-"

"Spare me the Mycroft-talk…" Thea clicked the torch into action and the finger all but disappeared. "This is wild! _May_ I do another? One more?"

Her father rolled his eyes in the affirmative.

"Anyway," Thea went on as she slid the skewer into a slightly hairy toe, "it's not like your life's been affected by death a whole lot."

"I beg your pardon?" Sherlock seemed momentarily stunned. "Barely a fortnight goes by without me encountering a dead body, death permeates my life."

"Sure, but all the people you…interact with…regularly…" expressing what she meant without using any words describing overt emotion was tricky "…none of

them has died yet. Nor any of your influential senior relations."

"Uncle Rudy's dead," her father pointed out.

"Yea, okay, but did you see him when he was alive? After you moved out of home?" Sherlock shook his head slightly. "I rest my case. You're virtually untouched

by death. So you can stop acting as if you're impervious to mourning. It's pretentious."

As she payed renewed attention to the toe, she noted her father's posture stiffen slightly. Very few things annoyed him more than being called pretentious;

probably because he fancied himself a bit of a rebel, a thought that made Thea smile.

"I see," he said finally. "Whereas you, naturally, have experienced loads of deaths in your immediate circle, yes?"

"Well, I certainly am not the one who still has two living parents."

She could practically feel his irritation radiating from him in hot waves.

"Now who's being pretentious?" he snipped.

Still grinning, Thea set the toe off and marvelled at the satisfying 'whoosh' when it went up in flames.

"Is it this fast even when it's a whole person?" she asked.

"Not quite." Sherlock frowned. "Not at all, in fact…odd. This is definitely the substance forensics identified, but the victims all burned for far longer than this

reaction should suggest. Odd."

"Odd…" Thea echoed, shivering slightly at the thought of burning alive for any amount of time.

Her father was toying with a charred piece of bone, clearly on his way into the palace when suddenly he seemed to think better of it.

"Ask me something else about this."

"Oh…okay."

Supposedly this was a technique that helped him examine things from new angles – _and_ it left the option of simply declaring the questioner a moron if no fresh

angle was uncovered, which Sherlock always enjoyed. Even though she had been on the receiving end of his scorn countless times, Thea never refused when

he threw the bait out. The slim chance of actually proving herself helpful, or even remotely clever, was just too tempting.

"What's the common denominators of the victims?" she asked gamely.

"All of them are over the age of 40, have been living on the streets for considerable time, none have any convictions, all of them smoke," her father answered

at rapid pace.

"Okay…how does he get that stuff on them? It would take a while to cover a person in this."

"We don't know."

"Is there anything on CCTV?"

"Nope. And they weren't in blind spots either. One moment they're sitting there, the next…poof."

"Right…"

"Come on! You can do better…"

"I'm thinking…"

"Does it hurt?"

"Oh, you're hilarious." Thea made a face. "Where were they found?"

"Two in Whitechapel, one in Bethnal Green, another in Limehouse."

"Really…" A little something started buzzing deep in Thea's data banks. "And all of them since Wednesday?"

"The first Wednesday evening, two more in the early hours of Thursday – at four and five am respectively, the last Thursday afternoon. Then nothing. We had

high hopes for the weekend, but he's not done another."

"Strange pattern," Thea pointed out. Too far apart for a rampage, too few for a proper series.

"Thank you," Sherlock said with scathing sarcasm.

"You _asked_ for assistance."

"Is that what you call it?"

Ignoring him, Thea flipped open the paper file sitting next to the bowl of digits and flinched slightly at the picture of a weirdly charred carcass. An actual

carcass, with some burned meat, quite a lot of burned meat in fact, remaining on the jutting bones. Nothing like the results their home test was yielding.

"Can I try something?" she asked.

"These are not for playing, " Sherlock said warningly. "This is-"

"One more, alright?" Thea was up and rooting through the bottom of a kitchen cupboard. "If it's no good, you can use one of my fingers."

Her father snorted a laugh.

"One."

From beneath a stack of substandard scarfs, Thea extracted a single woollen glove. She sawed one of its fingers off with a bread knife and carefully smeared it

with the exhilarant, clamped the damp piece of wool between a pair of tongs and went to the bathroom to retrieve the barely used hairdryer. Using the coolest

setting, lest the fabric combust from contact with hot air, she dried it completely, took it back to the kitchen and gently inserted one of the severed fingers.

Sherlock was watching with considerable interest now.

Thea skewered the clothed finger.

"Do you have any cigarettes?" she asked.

"I should be so lucky," her father sighed.

In lieu of the real deal, Thea rolled up a piece of paper, set in on fire and carefully let a bit of glowing debris fall on her test object.

The result was mildly terrifying. While the glove went up like gangbusters, it also fused with the finger in the process, apparently transferring the exhilarant to

the first layer of skin. The finger burned for a long time, filling the kitchen with a vaguely bacony stench. When the flames ceased, it lay smouldering and still

meaty on the metal plate before them.

"Huh." Sherlock picked up the finger and examined it carefully. "Right."

"You know the Homeless Link at Minories?" Thea asked.

Her father nodded pensively.

"They have handout day every second Wednesday."

"Handout day?"

"It's when they give out free clothes and things, stuff that gets donated. It's on from one to four in the afternoon." Thea looked up at her father waiting for him

to tell her he already knew this, but nothing of the kind occurred. "I don't know if they keep a register or something," she went on, "but I venture all your

burned buddies were there this week, getting clothes from the same bag. It's just a question of tracking down the arsehole who donated the bag."

Sherlock stared at her with a strange expression.

"It makes sense," she said quickly. "The Minories is near enough to all the places the bodies were found and that particular place is epically good. And then,

you know, a bit of falling cigarette ash and _whoosh_. That would also explain that no perpetrator was caught on CCTV. He made them self-immolate, sort

of… _what?_ "

"That was…good." Sherlock fished his mobile from his pocket and started texting. "How did you know about that charity place?"

"I dunno…I just do."

"Don't know," her father corrected, studying her intently. "And that's not even true. How do you know?"

"I may have gone there once or twice for lunch," Thea said without looking at him.

"Why?"

"Free lunch?" she offered lamely.

"Recently?"

"No, of course not. There's food in the house now."

It took her father a moment to process this information.

"Look," Thea said before he had a chance to blow up. "Ancient history. And as it turns out, it comes in handy. So hooray. Yes?"

"Hooray," Sherlock said morosely, turning his attention to a text pinging on his mobile. "I'm off. Here…" he dug into his trouser pocket and withdrew a crumpled

ten pound note. "Get yourself an indecent quantity of some disease ridden curry. Lest I let my child starve."

"I didn't mean-"

"Don't wait up," her father interrupted and fairly sprinted from the room, throwing his coat on as he left with a motion that reminded Thea of Batman. That

would have been even worse, living with Batman. The Bat Cave didn't even _have_ a fridge.

()

Many hours later, Thea was standing on a kitchen chair downstairs in 221C, a slab of foam between her teeth and a hot glue gun in hand. After almost a year

of keeping a stiff upper lip, Mrs Hudson had finally put her foot down a few nights ago and demanded Thea soundproof her hallowed halls of practise. It was

turning out to be quite the project and Thea wondered frequently how long it must have taken Marcus to do his garden shed.

The remainder of her curry – she had gone completely overboard and, uncharacteristically to the extreme, had been unable to finish – sat on an upturned milk

crate on the floor. The Clash was playing very softly on her ancient boom box in the corner and Thea, absorbed in her work, sang along absentmindedly.

"My daddy was a bank robber but he never hurt nobody…"

The door creaked open behind her.

"It can't be too loud, that's preposterous," Thea groaned without turning around. "I can barely hear it in here, Mrs Hudson, your ears can't possibly be keener

than mine – you're three hundred years old…"

"If even I recognise this as bad manners, it must be frankly atrocious behaviour."

"You're home early."

"It's 2.15 in the morning."

"Incredibly early," Thea corrected herself. "Have some curry. They claim it's lamb but I've got a feeling it might be horse. His sister's married to a French man, he

runs a delicatessen in Mayfair and throws them stuff off the back of the van. They're having twins in September, not his sister and the French man, Khalid and

his missus. He thinks they're boys but she already found out that's not so and she can't bring herself to tell him. Afraid he'll be displeased."

"Will he be?" She heard her father sit down on the crate and place the take away on the floor.

"No, he's going to be delighted. He'll call them the twin moons of his life and be out of his mind with paternal adoration. Eat something, it's fine. I had it hours

ago and I'm still standing." Thea pressed the foam against the spider's web of glue with all her weight, using her entire body and still the bloody thing slipped.

"Or are you still on a case?"

"As it happens, no."

Thea peeled the loose sheet of foam from the wall and put it between her knees, inserting another stick of hard glue into the gun.

"And?"

"Some new age peaceniks got their bags confused," Sherlock said with a slight chuckle. "The clothes were meant for a rather dramatic rally next week - they

were going to burn effigies of some dull politicians - and the prepared props ended up in their donations pile by mistake."

"No!" Thea lowered the hot glue and turned to stare at him. "No chance."

Her father met her eyes, his laughter barely containable now.

"That's not funny…" Giggles rose before she'd even made it to the end of her sentence. "That's just awful…oh, man…that's a whole new level of irony!"

Sherlock was shaking his head, shoulders jerking with spasms of mirth.

"Can you imagine…" Thea gasped, shakily getting off the chair and sitting down, "…can you just imagine what John's gonna call this one?"

This sent her father into full-blown hysterics, for his standards anyhow; he didn't even correct her expression.

"The _Char_ -ity Case…" she could barely whimper it and was only vaguely aware of Sherlock doubled over on the crate, vibrating with laughter.

"You're a disgrace," he managed to choke out. "Shame on you."

It took them a considerable amount of time to compose themselves, probably because neither party was trying very hard.

"Shame on you," Sherlock finally repeated when he regained the power of speech. "And shame on your glue gunmanship. Give it here."

Thea handed over the glue.

"You're too slow applying the foam," her father explained, layering glue on the wall. "It can't fuse with the adhesive if the glue cools down. And...go!"

By quarter to five Thea's arms were aching, Sherlock's hands were freckled with miniscule burns and 221C was ready for action.


	2. The Kato Method

Thea picked the lock of 221 Baker Street and entered the hallway. The muffled sounds of crap telly were drifting from behind Mrs Hudson's door, but otherwise

the place was silent. There was no voices from upstairs, no footsteps, no violin, nothing – _yet_ her father's coat was hanging on its customary hook by the door.

Well.

Well, well, well.

For a minute or so, Thea remained silent and still at the foot of the stairs, straining to hear the shower or the kettle. Nothing. She took off her backpack and sat

it on the floor, then shrugged out of her jacket and hung it up, rolled her shoulders a few times and pulled each leg up into a hamstring stretch. Then she

slowly ascended the stairs, taking care to avoid the creaking step.

The living room door was open. Thea poked her head around the corner, scanning for movement and locating nothing. The kitchen appeared to be empty as

well. Very, very gently Thea padded across the room, stopping to listen every few steps. Sherlock's door was open but there was neither sight nor sound of

him.

She turned on the kettle and retreated into the hallway quickly and quietly, pressing herself against the wall next to the door, waiting for the bathroom door or

broom closet to open, but neither did. Alright then. Thea slid up the stairs to her room, finding her door closed as she had left it. She examined the doorhandle

and found the nearly invisible piece of jumper fluff she'd placed there this morning undisturbed. It fluttered to the ground when she turned the handle and

pushed the door open with extreme caution.

Once inside, she took a quick stride towards her closet and pulled the door open, revealing her clothes and a jumble of books, shoes and miscellanea piled up

on the bottom. So far, so good. Thea turned and made for her bed, intending to arm herself with the cricket bat she kept next to it before going back

downstairs, when a hand shot out from under the bed, closed around her ankle and yanked.

The element of surprise and the fact that she was mid-step worked perfectly together in getting her off balance. With a small shriek, Thea stumbled and landed

on one knee, trying to steady herself on the edge of her desk, toppling a stack of books. As she struggled to regain a stable position, Sherlock slithered from

under her bed like a demented lizard, leaped to his feet and made to wrap one arm around her neck. Thea ducked, electing to fall to her knees entirely,

counteracting his superior reach by going down rather than attempting lateral evasion. His hand brushed her hair but didn't manage to grab hold.

"Fire!" Thea screamed at the top of her lungs. "Kidnappers! Help me!"

As she rolled herself under the bed, she wondered briefly where he might have put the books and shoe boxes that usually occupied this space, but decided

this matter was not at all pressing. Glancing back she took aim and kicked her boot against his ankle with all her might, satisfied when she heard him grunt in

pain. She emerged on the other side of the bed, happy to have created a momentary buffer zone. Time to decide on an escape route – window or door, that

was the question.

"I don't know this person!" she shouted. "I'm being abducted!"

Her father was poised to jump, eyeing her with the intensity of a hungry tiger from his side of the bed. Thea flicked her eyes towards the window and launched

towards the door simultaneously, hooking her fingers around the doorframe just as Sherlock caught the back of her jumper in his fist and yanked her

backwards. She should have left the bloody jacket on…

Keeping a firm hold on the doorframe, Thea lifted her legs off the ground, forcing her father to take most of her weight and kicked backwards, catching him

square in the stomach, winding him briefly but enough to weaken his grip so she could wrench free with the momentum of her legs crashing back towards solid

ground.

Miraculously, she didn't stumble and raced for the stairs.

"Help!"

She leapt of the top step and thunked down on the landing so hard it made her teeth rattle. While her landing might not have earned her a ten in terms of

elegance, it was steady enough to allow her to break into a run towards the living room – and its stock of weapons - practically immediately. She could hear

her father descend the stairs rapidly behind her and sped up…alas, not enough.

Sherlock caught her and spun her, pinning her to the wall. Thea brought her knee up, but he blocked her easily before spinning her again, so her face was flush

with the wallpaper. She tried to whack her head backwards to catch him under the chin or something equally futile. When this did her no favours, she slammed

her free elbow towards his thorax, only to find it trapped and twisted halfway up her back.

"Somebody, please, help me!" she screamed.

"Really?" her father hissed, slightly out of breath. "Is this really the best you can do?"

In response Thea sank her teeth into his arm.

Sherlock yelled and wrapped a handful of her hair around his hand in an attempt to pull her off. Although it hurt terrifically, Thea managed to step a foot up

onto the wall and push back hard enough to make them crash through the open door into the living room, where they landed next to the coffee table,

Sherlock's head missing the corner narrowly.

Grunting and growling father and daughter wrestled, grabbing folds of fabric and knocking over a pile of take away containers filled with soil samples.

"Christ almighty, you pair of numpties!" John appeared in the doorframe, shaking his head. "Mrs H's lamps are about to come down…"

"Shoot him!" Thea gasped, struggling in vein against her father's vice like grip securing her to the floor.

"Eight," Sherlock growled. "Seven…six…five…four…"

"Take the shot!" Thea shouted.

"Three…two…one…congratulations, you are now chained up in some psychotic's basement, bound for a short but painful life of white slavery." Sherlock

released his daughter and rose, rubbing his shoulder.

"No, I'm not," she argued, propping herself up into a seated position. "I was loud enough and bought myself huge amounts of time, someone would have

heard and come to help, surely."

"Your faith in people is disconcerting," her father sneered. "John's your friend, supposedly, and he appeared unmoved to come to the rescue."

Thea rolled her eyes.

"True," John said drily. "But I wouldn't be surprised if the neighbours had called the police by now. Is this really absolutely necessary?"

"You're the one who constantly harps on about child abduction," Sherlock pointed out.

"I don't constantly-" John sighed and changed tactics. "Sign her up for Karate or something. Or, better yet, put a stop to witching hour wanderings."

"Karate?" Thea giggled. "You're jesting."

"Karate, Taekwondo, boxing…" John huffed. "They do Krav Maga in the gym round the corner from my work now. All I'm saying is that there are alternative

teaching methods of self-defence to beating the daylights out of each other at home."

"The Kato-method is a tried and true concept," said Sherlock.

"What's good enough for Inspector Clouseau is good enough for me," Thea agreed, examining a tear in the seam of her t-shirt. "Good job, you've ruined it,"

she growled at her father.

"That's a bit fresh considering you have on occasion refused garments for the very reason that they were intact," said he. "Take it as an opportunity to learn to

sew."

"Please. Are we Amish now?"

Her father shrugged and made for the kitchen, limping ever so slightly, to put the kettle on. Thea pulled herself onto the sofa and rubbed her head, surprised

to find no bald spot.

"Are you alright?" John asked her quietly.

"Of course she is," Sherlock grumbled from the kitchen. "I take precautions-"

"You gave her a black eye last month," John interrupted.

"The end of the bannister did, actually," Thea pointed out quickly, omitting the fact that her father had tripped her in the hallway causing her to face plant into

it.

John had made quite the scene when he came home to find Thea holding a packet of Mrs Hudson's frozen peas to her purpling cheekbone and she didn't think

a repeat was necessary. Sure enough, he was already glowering at the memory.

"And it would be a pointless exercise if he didn't put in any effort," Thea added.

"I still fail to see why this kind of _training_ is suddenly necessary," John huffed. "It's not as though you've only recently started being a night time vagabond."

"It's your fault, largely," Sherlock informed him, reappearing in the room with cups of tea.

"How?"

"You've been instrumental in raising my profile," the detective said calmly. "And, by association, Alethea's."

"So?"

"So in the admittedly unlikely scenario that… _people_ may elect harming her as a way to get even, I do rest easier knowing she'll be able to at least put up a

fight," Sherlock explained.

Thea nodded and gave John, who was looking rather pained, a cheerful thumbs up.

"I'm still not sure you need to be quite this brutal," John said after a small pause.

"Because an actual attacker would be ever so gentle." Sherlock's voice was dripping with sarcasm.

"You know," Thea said pensively, sipping tea, "it might be a really good idea to teach me how to shoot a gun."

"No," her father and John replied as one.

She sighed and sank into the sofa cushions, wincing slightly at an unspecified ache in her lower back.

"How about throwing knives?" she asked.

Sherlock snorted.

"Nunchucks?"

"I don't think they're even legal," John grumbled.

"Mace?"

"What is it with girls and fancy accessories?" her father asked John.

"Fine," Thea said grumpily. "I'll just start lugging a claw hammer around, shall I?"

"Weapons are overrated," John said. "Attackers can disarm you and use them against you. Best to know what to do with your hands."

"That's a bit macho," Thea said, grinning at him.

"John's not wrong," Sherlock chimed in. "And considering his military history he probably knows twenty ways to kill a man with his bare hands."

"Not quite twenty," John said modestly.

"Will you teach me?" Thea asked immediately.

"No."

"Just five or six ways?" she begged. "Or something really painful but non-lethal?"

"No."

"One thing? The best thing?"

"Not a chance."

"But, see, if you _did_ ," Thea went on with her most charming smile, "I could use it next time Kato over here jumps me and then he'd be both in pain and annoyed

at being beaten up by a physically inferior opponent. You could hurt and shame him without getting your hands dirty."

"You are a twisted and mean-spirited creature," her father said fondly. "Lucky for me, John's a highly principled individual and when he says no, he means-"

"Meet me after work on Thursday," John interrupted. "We'll go to that gym on the corner, we'll be wanting a padded floor."

"Yes!" Thea punched the air and gave her father a sardonic grin. "You're going down, Kato."

"We'll see, Inspector," Sherlock said sweetly, sipping his tea. "We shall see."


	3. Balloon Animals

Engaging in odd projects was something of a family trait when it came to John's flatmates. Over time he had gotten used to their occasionally bizarre antics, at

least he had thought so. Clearly his tolerance for their shenanigans had not yet reached the expert level he'd fancied himself at; because the sight that met

him upon his return home stopped him dead in his tracks.

"What the hell are you doing?"

Thea didn't appear to hear him. She was bent over the coffee table, intent on the task of inserting the nozzle of a smallish helium container into the beak of a –

thankfully dead – pigeon. The table was littered with stray feathers, needles and thread, a variety of scissors, a bowl – his bowl, John's bowl, the one he ate

breakfast from whenever they left him any milk – filled with tiny, smelly entrails…it was carnage. John's eyes snagged on a handful of strings tied to the foot of

the table and followed them up until they came to rest on a bunch of…pigeons. Gutted, inflated pigeons, bobbing gently up and down. Some of them had

spread wings, John spotted a coil of wire and a pair of pliers on the table; some simply sat as though roosting. There were six of them, up near the ceiling. And

about six more piled on the floor next to Thea. And about three, victims of the experimental phase of this morbid project, splattered on the couch and the wall

under the window.

"No," John said loudly, more to assure himself than to elicit a response. "No. This is simply not on."

Thea had now finished inflating her latest bird and was reaching for a roll of electrical tape. Pulling the pigeon off the nozzle, she clamped its beak shut

between two fingers and started to wind the tape tightly around it. There was a faint hissing noise of escaping helium, but it stopped as she sealed the beak

completely. Thea tied the pigeon to a string and watched it float up to join the others with a look of deep satisfaction.

"Thea."

She jumped so violently at the sound of John's voice, she knocked over the stack of dead birds next to her. One of them looked up at John with plaintive, dead

eyes.

"Bloody hell, John," Thea said, shaking her head at him. "You nearly gave me a heart attack."

"I gave _you_ …" John closed his eyes for a moment, breathing deeply, determined not to lose it quite yet. "What is this? What are you doing?"

"Uhm…making balloon animals," the girl replied in that infuriating tone she and her father both used when speaking to the simple minded. "Obviously."

"Why?"

Thea cocked her head at him.

"Passing the time?" she offered uncertainly. John knew she was working out his expression and he was doing her no favours by attempting to control himself.

His face was probably showing traces of horror, disgust, anger and bafflement in equal measure _and_ brief flickers, seeing as he was working to keep his

expression neutral. While she was clearly unsure as to what he was thinking, she was becoming rapidly aware that he was unimpressed.

"It's fine," she said.

"The sofa is covered in dead pigeon bits," John pointed out.

"It'll come out." Thea smiled at him, apparently relieved that she'd worked out what was bothering him. "The wall, too. Don't worry. I was just going to finish

these before I cleaned up. Seemed stupid to clean intermittently when there would still be more mess later."

With that, she turned her back and selected a fresh cadaver, this one a white specimen with brown freckles, picked up a scalpel and, holding the bird over

John's bowl, deftly sliced open its belly, spilling its insides on top of the small pile of guts already present. There was minimal splatter onto the table top.

"Thea."

"Hm?" She was digging her bare fingers into the pigeon's stomach cavity in an attempt to dislodge anything left behind.

"Stop."

Obediently she stopped and looked at him quizzically, her index and middle finger still submerged in the pigeon to the first knuckle.

"What?" she asked.

It struck John that he didn't even know where to begin. There was, weird as it seemed, very little doubt in his mind that Thea's innocence was genuine. This

was, unbeknownst to Thea, the only thing keeping John from throwing the pigeons and her out of the window.

"Where'd you get these?" John nodded towards the dead birds.

"Up the road," she said vaguely.

"Up the road?" he echoed.

"Yea."

"Where exactly?"

Thea heaved a put upon sigh.

"The Lord's. The cricket fanatics have been putting out poison bait to keep the pigeons from defiling the bleachers," she explained. "They clean the bodies up

every morning, but they never get there before eight, so I went and got these at six this morning."

"Do you think it might be wise to wear gloves?" John said with barely contained dismay.

"It's impossible to sew with gloves on." Thea rolled her eyes. "And it's not like I'm licking my fingers. Don't be so squeamish, John."

" _Squeamish_?" he exploded.

"Sorry, okay, sorry," Thea said quickly, holding her hands up. "Delicate. Is that better?"

"No, Thea, it's not," John snapped, advancing on her little laboratory of horrors and finding himself disinclined to get too close after a few steps. "It's not even

the point."

"What is the point?" she asked with genuine curiosity.

"The living room is full of dead birds," he was about one decibel from shouting. "It reeks of cadaver, there's guts on the wall and – "

"I'm cleaning when I'm finished, remember? And I couldn't do it at the kitchen table because I'm not allowed to disturb the experiments. D'uh."

"Thea!"

She flinched and frowned up at him.

"I don't see the problem," she said quietly.

"It's bloody foul!"

"Pigeons aren't fowls," Thea pointed out. "That's chickens and ducks and turkeys and such. Pigeons are Colum-"

"You know very well what I meant," John cut her off with serious thunder in his voice. "Why are you mutilating dead birds in the living room? And if you tell me

you were bored I'm-"

"Well, I was bored, _but_ -" Thea held up a finger to stop John completely blowing up, "- this was not my idea. You can't shout at me for following suggestions

from responsible adults."

"Did Sherlock tell you to make these?" John asked.

This was by no means an impossibility.

"No," Thea scoffed. "Uncle Mycroft did."

"Come again?"

"Uncle. Mycroft. Did."

"Don't talk to me like I'm an imbecile," John said menacingly.

"I'm not!" Thea protested. "I called Uncle Mycroft yesterday to see if I should come over and practise – because I'm _that desperate_ for something to do – but he

was busy. And when I mentioned I was dying of boredom, he told me to learn to make balloon animals. Turned out to be kind of fun."

John slapped his forehead rather hard.

"Did that hurt?" Thea asked when he'd slid his palm down to rest it on his chin.

"He was being sarcastic."

"Who?"

"Your uncle." John shook his head. "He was being sarcastic. And even if he had not been – which he was – these are not balloon animals, Thea."

"Of course they are," she said.

"Thea," John said very slowly. "Balloon animals are _balloons_ made into _animal shapes_ , not _animals_ made into _balloons._ "

For a moment Thea became very still. She glanced up at the pigeons bobbing in the breeze coming through the open window and over at the gutted carcass

still impaled on her fingers.

"Oh," she said finally.

John walked over to his untarnished – lucky for her – chair and sat down heavily. How someone this intelligent could be so mindbogglingly stupid was beyond

him. Thea slowly slid her hand out of the pigeon and placed it on the table. She looked over at John uncertainly.

"So…" she said, "…I suppose I should start cleaning this up now?"

"Great idea."

"Huh. Yes. Okay."

Somewhat dejectedly, Thea wandered into the kitchen and returned with a black garbage bag and a spray bottle labelled _Blood &Guts_ in Sherlock's neatest

handwriting. She threw the unprepared pigeons into the bag and tied it shut before lobbing it out of the window.

"Really?" John groaned.

"I'll put it in the bin when I go downstairs in a bit," Thea groaned back. "No point wasting time going down and coming back up, is there?"

"What if the bag's burst?" John challenged. "Mrs H won't appreciate her backdoor being-"

"Fine!" Thea stuck her head out of the window and pulled it in a second later with a frown.

"It's come undone, hasn't it?"

"No," she said slowly. "It's not there at all."

"What?" John came over and stuck his head out the window as well, vaguely aware of the sound of footsteps advancing up the stairs. There was no evidence

of the bag of pigeons. "That's-"

"Someone left a bag of pigeons at the back door," Sherlock announced as he entered the room, bag in hand. "Do you suppose Mrs Hudson uses them for…" his

gaze found the balloon animals "…oh, I see."

He walked across the room and pulled one of the inflated pigeons down by its string, tapped its wing and made it spin.

"How did you seal them?" he asked.

"Coated the inside with gaffer tape before I sewed them up." Thea was hovering by the couch, the spray bottle in hand. "And electrical tape for the beak."

"Why not the gaffer?"

"Aesthetics. Didn't have gaffer in nice colours."

John now noticed for the first time that the beaks were shut with red, green and yellow tape.

Sherlock had put the bag down and was examining the pigeon closely, turning it over, sniffing it.

"Why didn't you prepare them properly?" he asked. "They'll decompose."

"I thought drying them would make them too brittle to inflate and there wasn't any borax. And…" Thea sighed and finally started spraying the couch, "…they're

going in the bin anyways."

"Whatever for?" Sherlock had pulled down another bird and was checking out its dramatically outstretched wings. "This one's rather good."

"Really?" John and Thea asked together, though in completely different tones of voice. While Thea was perking up considerably, John could barely refrain from

whacking his head against the wall.

"For a pigeon this is sort of majestic," Sherlock said.

"Thank you." Thea gave John a decidedly smug grin.

"You must be joking." John turned to Sherlock and stared at him rather hard. "It's all over the-"

"Oh, it'll come out," Sherlock cut him off.

"Thank you!" Thea put down the spray bottle and went to stand next to her father. "I told him, but he went all spacky."

"Spacky is not a word," Sherlock admonished.

"It's not only a word, it's the only applicable adjective," Thea insisted.

"You-" John started.

"Spacky," she sang.

"These are delightful."

John rolled his eyes. His flatmate was being uncharacteristically gushy and it was starting to seriously tick him off.

"What were you planning on doing with them?" Sherlock asked Thea.

"Nothing in particular," she admitted. "I just sort of got carried away. That said…"

()

Mycroft Holmes returned home at an ungodly hour, yearning for a stiff drink and the warm embrace of his bed. The first desire was satisfied easily enough,

standing up in the library, watching the rain pelting the windows. When he opened his bedroom door and switched on the light in one smooth movement,

however, all exhaustion was driven away by the unfamiliar sensation of being not quite able to believe his eyes. Tied to his bedposts, the handle on the top

drawer of his bedside table and the base of the lamp upon it, bobbing merrily in the slight draught coming through the newly opened door, were deformed,

deceased pigeons. One of whom had a rolled up piece of paper tied to its stiff leg. The scene was nothing if not Kafkaesque.

Disgusted to the point of near-retching, Mycroft untied the letter and fairly dove for the hand sanitiser in the bedside drawer. Only after he'd doused himself

with half the bottle, did he feel satisfied that he was not going to contract ringworm.

Sitting down on the edge of his bed, noting with dismay the stray feathers on the duvet, Mycroft unrolled the note and read: _The neglected student's mind_

 _begets oddities._

Making a mental note to increase security, Mycroft went to sleep in the guest room. He would deal with the pigeons – and his dear relations - in the morning.


	4. Karma

"… still absolutely, irrevocably, indubitably _no way, Jose_!"

John closed the front door and stopped at the bottom of the stairs.

"This is not up for discussion," Sherlock thundered in the living room.

"Too bloody right," Thea shouted back. "It's not happening! It's a non-event!"

For a moment, John toyed with the thought of simply going back out and finding some dinner down the street, allowing the Holmesian domestic to blow over.

Then again, watching Sherlock and Thea argue usually proved to be rather fun. Quietly, he ascended the stairs.

"You are going and that is final," Sherlock announced.

"Oh, you are simply dreaming," his daughter countered.

John leaned on the doorframe surveying the battlefield. There was no evidence of thrown objects, Thea's laptop, for example – a particularly popular missile –

sat untouched on the kitchen counter, which strongly suggested that his flatmates had barely begun their disagreement. They had taken up their respective

battle stations in the kitchen, the table serving as a buffer zone. Sherlock was holding onto its edges as though to restrain himself from physical attack; Thea,

arms crossed and eyebrows knitted in a supreme display of annoyance, was leaning against the kitchen counter, every detail of her body language designed to

drive her father insane.

"Alethea," Sherlock growled, "I am not asking."

"Which is just as well," she growled back in perfect imitation of his tone "because I'm not doing it."

"If you have even the faintest desire to ever engage in any of the inane activities you consider pleasurable again, I suggest an attitude adjustment." Sherlock

leaned further over the table, his posture very much that of a predatory animal ready to leap and maul.

"You wouldn't, if you were me," Thea pointed out casually.

"I have endured more than my fair share of these things, thank you." Her father's eyes were blazing. "If one cannot count on one's offspring as willing consort

in times of need what is the point of reproducing?"

"Children give so much back," Thea said coolly.

Sherlock grinned sardonically, dug into his pocket and slammed a key down on the table.

"I don't need that," Thea scoffed. "You've made sure of that."

Sherlock's other hand slid into his other pocket and produced a small black case that looked a lot like Thea's lock picking kit.

"Sodding pickpocket," Thea shouted.

"Guttermouth away, child," Sherlock purred. "But you are not accessing that infernal noise contraption until you have done your filial duty."

"In some cultures that includes patricide!"

John snorted a laugh and two curly heads whipped around.

"Help me!" Thea crossed the room and grabbed John's arm, pulling him into the kitchen. "He's being a despot! Explain to him about human rights!"

"Which of your human rights is under attack?" John asked, unable to keep a grin off his face.

"Freedom of movement, for one." Thea eyeballed her father. "He can't make me go anywhere I do not wish to go."

"He sort of can," John said gently.

"Judas," Thea muttered before turning back to her father. "You can't. You're not the boss of me."

"I am your father!"

"You haven't even seen that film!"

"What on earth are you talking about? Don't try and distract me!" Sherlock nodded towards his hostages on the table. "Don't think I'm bluffing."

"I don't care," Thea snapped. "I'm not going."

"I will lock that basement flat forever," her father hissed. "It will be sealed and booby trapped. No more Gene Krupa for you."

" _Gene Krupa_?" Thea smacked her forehead. "And you wonder why I don't want to be seen with you in public? You don't know anything about anything!"

John's presence in the kitchen was clearly forgotten, so he quietly pulled out a chair and sat down to enjoy the rest of the show.

"Your obstinacy is becoming a nuisance," Sherlock said threateningly.

"I don't care!" Thea stomped her foot and John bit down on another laugh, this was very atypical Thea-behaviour, she didn't usually argue like a child.

Somehow, the stomping seemed to catapult Sherlock to the end of his tether.

"What is wrong with you?" he yelled. "One evening, for God's sake, there will even be food! You love food!"

"I don't want to wear the stupid dress," Thea hissed.

"Any garment can be tolerated for four hours," her father shot back.

John noticed the faintest hint of a smile flash across Thea's face.

"These things are boring!" she exclaimed tragically, a woebegone expression firmly in place again.

"No one's ever died of boredom!"

"Say that again." Thea glared at him.

"No one," Sherlock said, enunciating with furious precision, "has ever died of boredom."

Thea smiled.

"Okay," she said.

Her father eyed her suspiciously.

"Pardon?" he asked.

"I'll come," Thea said sweetly.

Sherlock sat down and shot John a questioning look.

"What just happened here?" he asked.

"Either you've asserted your parental authority," John offered "or something fishy is going on."

"Let's go with fishy."

"What's the issue anyway?" John asked.

"Gran is getting a lifetime achievement award," Thea explained. "For outstanding services to the art of mathematics or something that warrants a social

extravaganza. The kind of occasion that calls forth the expectation of undivided family attendance."

"So, you're going?" John looked at Sherlock in genuine surprise.

"Unfortunately," he grumbled.

"Uncle Mycroft would have him arrested otherwise," Thea chirped.

"And you are also going?" John turned to Thea.

"Of course I am," she said. "Gran's the bomb diggety."

Sherlock winced visibly at her turn of phrase, the froze.

"What's your game?" he asked.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"If you were always going to come, why spend the better part of the afternoon being contrary?"

"You're exaggerating, it was barely half an hour. Can I have your phone for a minute?" Thea grinned.

Tentatively, Sherlock handed her his mobile. Thea dialled.

"Hey, Gran, it's me," she said a moment later. "Are you sitting down? Do."

Thea sauntered over to the counter and tapped her laptop into action.

"Ready?"

She clicked a couple of times and held the phone close to the keyboard. A moment later, a little tiny but still unmistakable, Sherlock's voice filled the kitchen.

" _Any garment can be tolerated for four hours_."

"And wait for it…yea, I know…that one was just for extra credit. Ready?" Thea clicked twice more.

" _No one has ever died of boredom!_ "

Even though the phone was not on loudspeaker, John could hear Gran laughing on the other end of the line. Sherlock was staring at his daughter with an

unusual look of incomprehension.

"I know," Thea giggled into the phone. "No, I've got the whole thing. About twenty minutes of it. Really? Are you serious? Are you kidding, that would be the

best…yea, okay, hold on…" Thea held the phone out to her father. "She wants to talk to you."

"I should have drowned you in a bucket in infancy," Sherlock hissed, snatching the phone from her and snapping "What is it?"

Thea sauntered around the table and extracted a carton of pineapple juice from the fridge. She sat down next to John and gave him a triumphant wink before

swigging straight from the carton. On the other side of the table, her father, phone to ear, was rolling his eyes so vigorously it resembled an epileptic seizure.

"What was that all about?" John asked.

"Karma," Thea said with a grin. "It's a game Gran's invented. We've been playing it for years and years, on and off, and I just got about seven million points."

"What's the objective?"

"It's kind of like Bingo…hold on…" Thea dug into her pocket and produced a crumple A4 page. She nodded towards the living room and led the way to the sofa,

out of Sherlock's line of sight and earshot. "Look." She thrust the paper a John. "Gran made this list when we started the first round."

John perused the neat column of about fifteen sentences. Six of them – _Eat your dinner; No one's died of boredom yet; That is filthy, don't touch it; Do as you are_

 _told; Put on your clothes_ and _Go to bed_ – had great, sweeping ticks at the end.

"Oh, I see…" John shook his head, supressing giggles.

"These are all things Gran said ad nauseam to him," Thea explained. "And simultaneously things he swore he would never say to me. So the aim of the game is

to make him say them and provide either recorded evidence or reliable witness reports that he has done so. It doesn't have to be verbatim – see, here, with

the clothes?-" Thea pointed at _Put your clothes on_ "what he said before about garments being tolerable, that counts. In fact it's better, Gran reckons. So, I got

two in one go. Pretty spectacular, hey?"

"Amazing," John agreed. "What happens when you've made him say all of these?"

"I guess I'd win." Thea shrugged. "I don't rate my chances, though. Look. This one's the killer."

She pointed at a small, unassuming sentence in the middle of the list, _That does not belong in the refrigerator.  
_

"That's a tough one," John admitted.

" _You need your sleep_ , is also an unlikely candidate," Thea added. "It's okay though, there's prizes for each individual win."

"What'd you win today then?"

"The Flys," Thea beamed at him. "Well, their entire body of work on pristine vinyl, anyway."

"Who are they?"

John received only a roll of the eyes and figured The Flys were probably some long disbanded punk band. In the kitchen, Sherlock was muttering petulantly into

the phone before hanging up with a flourish.

"You." He turned and eyeballed his daughter. "You're despicable."

"Thank you," she chirruped.

"You're an ingrate and a nuisance and you don't clearly have no concept of family loyalty," Sherlock groused.

Thea squealed and jumped of the sofa.

"Did you hear that, John?" she asked urgently.

"I did." John was looking at the list in his hands, a devilish smirk playing on his lips.

"What?" Sherlock snapped.

"Call her back!" Thea snatched the paper of John, pulled a biro from her hair and ticked _Family must be appreciated_ with gusto.

"You're the spawn of Satan," her father growled, traversing the room and making a grab for the list. Thea evaded him gracefully and stuffed it back into her

pocket.

"I'm the spawn of you," she countered. "And you're not reading it. It's our game, not yours."

"I think it's fair to say I'm part of it, don't you?"

"The little silver boot doesn't need to know the rules of Monopoly," Thea said evenly. "It just needs to move in a circle."

"The boot? I'm the boot?"

"You can be the race car, if you like."

"How about the horse shoe?"

"There's no horse shoe."

"Yes there is."

"No."

"I'm positive there is," Sherlock insisted.

"Wanna bet?" Thea asked.

"Want to," her father said automatically. "Absolutely. If there is a horse shoe, you'll hand over your list."

"Fine." Thea held out her hand. "But if there isn't, you get me a turntable."

"A what?"

"Christ alive," Thea sighed. "A record player? A phonograph?"

"Deal."

"Sorry to break it to you, Sherlock," John interjected. "There is no horseshoe in Monopoly. Never has been."

"How would you know?" his flatmate snapped.

"Because I've spent about five thousand rainy afternoons having my arse handed to me by my sister in never-ending games of Monopoly. I can name the

streets in sequence to this day. Call it my super power."

"You couldn't have mentioned this two minutes earlier?" Sherlock looked utterly dismayed.

"Well, the kid needs something to play her winnings with," John pointed out.

"It's Christmas!" Thea exclaimed, letting loose with a shameless victory dance. "Hat trick!"

"You are both horrid human beings," Sherlock sighed.

"I, for one, have learned from the best," Thea sang. "And John's proving a quick study, innit, John?"

Her father threw up his hands and stalked from the room, leaving behind a bemused John and a still dancing Thea.


	5. Molotov Cocktail

Now this is just a little attempt at appropriating the 'Reichenbach Fall' and is bound to spiral into a longer fic - the drama of it all is simply too tempting. Let me know what you think - feedback motivates me :)

()()()()()

Before getting out of bed in the morning Thea took some deep breaths, scanned her body and mind and took a moment to consciously appreciate that she felt

alright. When Miss Understanding (the therapists name was Ella O'Connor but Thea applied the pun so stringently even her uncle had taken it up now) had

first suggested this practise, over a year ago now, Thea had rolled her eyes and scoffed. It had seemed pointless. Trite. Self-indulgent. Not to mention

conceited, considering that alright was not something Thea ever felt and had doubted she would feel again.

"I know," Miss Understanding said holding up her hands before Thea even opened her mouth. "Most people confuse 'alright' and 'without pain'. You're not most

people though, are you, Thea?"

She was good, Thea had to hand it to her. Miss Understanding not only knew how to flatter her, she also had a terrific sense of timing, which Thea had come to

believe to be one of the key abilities that separated the decent therapists from the useless. If she had suggested this exercise even one week earlier than she

did, Thea might have thrown the stupid bowl of potpourri resting on the coffee table at her before slamming the door, never to return.

As it were, that very afternoon Thea had caught herself feeling alright for the first time since…the dive…the leap…the one-bounce-check-

out…the…since… _bollocks_ …since her father's death. She'd been on the bike, riding towards Miss Understanding's office, her mp3 player on shuffle, when the

fiendish little device dragged up the third Brandenburg Concerto from some long forgotten playlist. Had one presented this scenario to Thea as an abstract and

asked her to predict her own reaction to it, she would have gone with something along the lines of losing all feeling in her hands and feet and therefore falling

off the bicycle, remaining prone on the ground, unable to do anything of any kind.

Yet when the situation was sprung on her with no warning whatsoever, disaster never came. Thea certainly got teary but she caught herself not _quite_ smiling,

but something close to it. The music was beautiful and she found she could appreciate this. It did shake lose a medium level avalanche of mental images

featuring her father – he was gently sticking tiny star shaped stickers on the neck of a child-sized violin…"It goes pink, red, purple, pink, green, red, pink,

purple…there you are! That's barely awful at all" – and the hedgehog residing in her chest curled tighter and bristled and it hurt her and made breathing a little

harder, but the pain did not seem to be the only sensation. If Thea was perfectly honest with herself, it was not even the dominant one. That moment on that

day the memory of Sherlock beginning his merciless indoctrination of his daughter with the works of Johann Sebastian Bach made her smile rather than

physically ill. Something seemed to be improving.

An hour later, Miss Understanding began to insinuate that the agony of loss and a modicum of contentment were not mutually exclusive and the very next

morning, Thea opened her eyes and realised she had not only slept but apparently slept without crying as she did so.

She'd stared at the ceiling for a while, suddenly acutely aware that she did not feel as though the room was caving in on itself. Aware the thought of going

downstairs was not brutally tiring. Confident, yes, confident that she would not lose her mind that day.

Every morning since then, even on the days when her feet tingled and her stomach was churning and the hedgehog was thrashing against the insides of her

ribcage, she'd made herself see that all that aside, she was feeling alright. If tears came, she would find a place to shed them. If the stupidity of the world

became overwhelming, she would numb her mind to it. If she was overtaken by a fury so rampant it made her teeth rattle, she would find a window to smash.

If that was insufficient, she would find some random to pick a fight with. If her doors opened and her senses ran amok, she would do…something. Or wait for it

to pass. But until any of these things happened – and they did, all the bloody time – she would get up and go downstairs and drink tea.

It was by no means a rosy situation but it was a damn sight better than the can't-see-an-inch-ahead-of-you blackness that had permeated the first few

months of life after death. It was, for lack of a better word, alright.

()()()()()()()()

John had already made tea and activated toasting procedures when Thea came jogging down the stairs.

"Morning," he said from behind the paper.

"Morning," she echoed, ramming a butter knife into the foil covering of a pristine Nutella jar.

"Big day," John said drily.

"And for you." Thea smothered a piece of toast in chocolate and chewed. "Nervous?"

"Petrified. You?"

"In denial," Thea mumbled around a mouthful of breakfast.

Both of them had grand evenings planned.

 _Arse_ – the band name Thea, Lisa and Marcus had chosen after much deliberation – had somehow finagled their way into playing at the monthly 'Recycling Night'

at the Doom Tomb. In keeping with the strict punk rock cover policy of the event, they had put together what they believed to be an epic set list, well, set list

was perhaps a little conceited seeing as each band got just half an hour, but they had determined their seven best covers, bringing them to 26 minutes plus

banter. If one did well at Recycle, grand things could come of it. It was the sort of event that launched bands into regular appearances in shitty basement dives

all over town and _Arse_ were raring to go.

As for John, well, John was going to put on his best suit, drop a week's wages on dinner and fine wine and propose marriage.

More toast popped and John emerged from the paper, clearing his throat a little.

"Don't you come down with bloody laryngitis today," said Thea. "You're prone to bad enough mumbling as it is. She'll think you're asking for the salt or

something. E-nun-ci-ate, yea? And put some honey in your-"

"I just wanted to say, again," John interrupted, his face fighting the urge to scrunch up with discomfort at feely-talk, "that even if she does say yes-"

"Oh, she won't," Thea cut in with a smirk, "not with the 'stache."

"You're a cow," he said affectionately. "Now, shut up. What I wanted to say-"

"John…" Thea groaned. "Just because Miss Understanding is riding us to be explicit about our feeeeelings, doesn't necessitate you reassuring me every hour of

every day that you won't kick me out of the house on grounds of getting hitched."

"I don't want you to worry, that's all."

"I don't worry." Thea rolled her eyes.

"Well, that's great," John said gruffly. "In that case, logistics. Do you need me to drop the drums at the whatsit?"

"Nope. We're using theirs."

"Thank God. Am I expecting you home tonight?"

"Also negatory." Thea opened the fridge and scanned for jams. "I'm sleeping a Lisa's, so you and Mary can be as loud as you like celebrating your impending

union."

It was John's turn to roll his eyes.

"She's left something for you, actually," he said, nodding towards a scrunched up plastic bag on the counter.

Thea ambled across the kitchen and opened it.

"Oh, rad!" she exclaimed when she extracted a black belt covered in violent studs. "Don't balls it up tonight, okay, John? She's a really good one."

"I'll pass on your thanks," John sighed, pushing himself up and stretching. "I'm off."

"See ya," Thea sang, wrapping the belt around her waist and grinning appreciatively. "Good luck tonight."

"Same." John was lingering at the kitchen door. "No silliness, yea?"

"Yes, John," Thea said with as much exasperation as she could muster. "I mean no, John. I won't ruin your special evening by getting arrested. Promise."

"Knock'em dead then."

"Wankers won't know what hit them," Thea called after him.

()()()()()()()

Once the door had fallen shut behind John, Thea went upstairs to start preparations for the evening. True, it was nine in the morning and they did not have to

be at the Doom Tomb for sound check until six pm, but quite a lot of things had to happen before that.

Thea sat on her bed, opened the top drawer of her bedside table and took out seven egg timers. She wound all of them to count down half an hour, placed

them in a half circle in front of her, leaned back against the headboard and closed her eyes.

 _The room was perfectly square and very sparsely furnished…actually, it was rather unfurnished apart from a series of plastic crates. Some of them had paper plates of_

 _them, overflowing with cigarette buds. Others were home to empty bottles covered in candle wax, holding sad little stumps. Rain was pouring outside, covering the_

 _windows in waterfalls. Someone was singing in the lower parts of the building. Thea, aged about five, sat on the window sill, looking at the drowning world. Sherlock_

 _was laid out on the discoloured carpet, staring at the empty socket for the ceiling lamp.  
_

 _"What if it never stops raining?" Thea asked.  
_

 _"Never?" her father asked dreamily.  
_

 _"Yes."  
_

 _"Loads of things," Sherlock licked his lips. "Rivers and lakes will rise and eventually flood everything around them. Vegetation will die. Crops will rot. Humans will move_

 _to higher ground in order to survive but there won't be sufficient higher ground for all, so there will be violence. Landslides will diminish a lot of the raised strongholds_

 _before too long…"  
_

 _Thea shivered.  
_

 _"Would we die?"  
_

 _The room smelled faintly of mould. There was rustling from the stack of old newspapers in the corner where a family of cockroaches had made their home. They had_

 _probably lived in this flat for longer than Thea and Sherlock. Cockroaches almost never died.  
_

 _"Probably." Her father's folded hands on his chest made him look a little like a dead body already. "But we're going to die anyway, even if it stops raining."  
_

 _"I don't want to die."  
_

 _"Very few people do."  
_

 _"I don't want you to die."  
_

 _Maybe it was the threat of tears in her voice that made him turn his head. Or perhaps his neck had just gone stiff. He forced his eyes to open all the way and Thea_

 _looked at his big black pupils wondering if he could be drowning from the inside out.  
_

 _"Everyone dies, Alethea."  
_

 _"When?"  
_

 _"When what?" Her father propped himself up on his elbows.  
_

 _"When are you going to die?"  
_

 _"I don't know," he said with the faintest hint of a groan. "Almost no person knows when they are going to die. People with terminal diseases are often given a rough_

 _time frame but other than that-"  
_

 _"And people who are going to be axed," Thea interrupted.  
_

 _"Axed?" Sherlock frowned. "Oh, the word is executed. Can you say that? E-xe-cu-ted?"  
_

 _Thea repeated dutifully.  
_

 _"Very good. And yes, people who are going to be executed know when they are going to die. Excellent point. However, it's very unlikely that I will ever be executed and_

 _based on our family's medical history I don't rate my chances for lethal diseases."  
_

 _"So when then?"  
_

 _"The average life expectancy for a healthy white male is between seventy-five and eighty years."  
_

 _Thea knitted her brow in thought.  
_

 _"How old am I now?" Sherlock asked.  
_

 _"Twenty-nine," she answered.  
_

 _"And how much is seventy-five less twenty-nine?"  
_

 _Thea shrugged.  
_

 _Her father sighed.  
"It's forty-six. In forty-six years you are going to be fifty-one. That's ten times older than you are now. Twenty-one years older than I am now."  
_

 _"That's a long time."  
_

 _"It's an age," her father said. "Any more morbid questions?"  
_

 _"Can we go get chips?"  
_

 _"When it stops raining."  
_

 _"What if it never stops raining?"  
_

 _"Then we will never get chips."  
_

 _"But-"_ the eggtimers erupted in a fountain of noise and Thea's eyes snapped open. She rubbed her face and collected the eggtimers, dumped them into the

drawer and pushed it closed with enough force to make the framed photograph on top of the drawer wobble threateningly. It was an aging Polaroid of a very

young Thea and a correspondingly young Sherlock, facing away from the camera, standing side by side, hands clasped behind their backs, looking out across

the field behind her grandparents' garden fence. Gran had given her this picture ages before her father's death, but Thea had only framed it and put it out a

few months ago. She wasn't entirely sure why she'd done it, it had just seemed like the right time to do such a thing. It was what people did and perhaps they

did stuff like that for a reason. Thus far it had made her feel neither better nor worse.

Thea picked up the picture and unlatched the little clips in the back, lifting the cardboard out of the way to reveal three perfectly rolled, if slightly squashed

joints. No point having a picture in a frame without making use of it to the fullest extent.

She walked over to the window and opened it, pulled the curtains shut behind her to keep the worst of the smoke out of the room and lit up.

Thea was fairly certain John was aware she had started getting stoned on a semi-regular basis, though she was careful not to do it when he was around and

kept her stash well hidden. These measures were more for John's good than her own. They had not heard from Mycroft in months, at least not properly – he

was away on 'business' and would be in touch 'as soon as it was convenient' – but when he returned he was sure to come down on Thea like a ton of bricks

about the weed smoking, it seemed only fair to give John the option of claiming complete ignorance.

Her mobile beeped somewhere behind her and Thea ducked briefly back into the room and fished it from between her tangled bedding. It was from Lisa. _Hair at_

 _eleven –byo colour_.

Thea finished her smoke, watching the street below. It had become familiar over the last two years, but once in a while it still struck her just how different it

was from Baker Street. It was by no means deserted, yet it seemed somewhat lifeless. Straggling commuters were walking towards the tube station to begin

their half hour journey to civilisation, a couple of mothers were pushing strollers towards the shops three quiet corners away. The normal could be

overwhelming at times. It seemed outrageous that the world could just keep turning and turning and turning without so much as missing a beat no matter

what happened.

"Bollocks," Thea said quietly. It was bollocks. It seemed strange that she should miss her father more on a day that held great promise. It wasn't like he would

have attended her show. It wasn't even like he would have taken particular interest. He would have commented unfavourably on what she chose to wear. He

certainly would have had a few choice words to say about her hair. Maybe, Thea thought, his disapproval would have validated her, made her feel like she was

rebelling against her parent, as was the proper course of life. They would have had blazing rows, he would have railed against her inability to withstand

natures assault on her teenage brain cells, pointed out that she was in the process of becoming stupid…it didn't bear thinking about. She would never again

shock him or surprise him or make him cringe with incorrect grammar.

She would pack her bag instead.

Thea had planned her outfit carefully. The look she was going for was as close an approximation of Animal – star drummer of the Electric Mayhem Band – as

humanly possible. She had torn stove pipe jeans, a white singlet with very deliberate holes, a bike chain to hang around her neck. At eleven Lisa would set to

work on her head, transforming her bleached, thirsty curls into a rainbow mop of red, orange and pink. She would be beautifully hideous. And it would just

have to be enough that she herself thought so.

()()()()()()()()

Thea rode through the cemetery gates at ten thirty, this evening's playlist blasting at barely tolerable level from her headphones. She dropped her bike next to

the black headstone and sat down, her back against its smooth surface, the letters of her father's name scratchy against her bare shoulders.

Coming here was completely stupid.

The remains below her were in dry decay, bones becoming brittle inside the leathery skin, hair long and discolouring, nails curled, suit mouldy; whether she

was here or not. Thea wished sometimes that she'd been raised to believe in souls and spirits, it might have turned her father's grave into a place of true

solace. A place where she could talk to him, confident that he was present and hearing her and watching her and perhaps feeling some kind of posthumous joy

at her continuous visits.

As it were she knew that all there was left of Sherlock was the compost developing in the wooden box underneath the deceptively green grass. What little of

his juices had made its way out of the coffin had long been absorbed by the surrounding soil. His mind was gone, his energy was spent, everything that had

made him _him_ had simply disappeared. Only the transport remained, taking its final battering until there would be nothing but bones. His bones would still be

here long after Thea herself had died. She'd be compost in a box of her own before the last trace of her father vanished from existence. Coming here was

completely stupid and pointless and above all shameful, because even though she knew perfectly well that it was ridiculous, being close to the compost of

Sherlock made her feel a little less alone.

Thea ran her hand over the grass. Her fingers found the familiar small indent and dug deeper into it until her hand disappeared into the soil. Slowly she

scratched together a handful of soft dirt, rolled it between her palms until it was about the size of a Malteser. She exhaled deeply and placed the ball of earth

in her mouth, chewing thoughtfully forty-two times before swallowing.

At ten thirty-six, Thea rode out of the cemetery gates, her tongue slightly gritty and her mind firmly trained on the evening's extravaganza.

()()()()()()()

By one-thirty in the afternoon, Thea – head aflame with fresh dye – rode to a depressing phone and internet café in Hackney to check the email account she'd

opened under the name of Ellen Mackenzie a few months ago. Her inbox contained one new message, junk mail advertising active wear bargains. Since her

uncle had left on his 'business trip' she'd received the same ad every two days like clockwork, her notification that Mycroft, wherever he was, was alive and

well. It was alternately sent to Ellen Mackenzie, Thomas Maine and Steve Johnson, each of whom used a different email provider and logged in at a different

internet café.

"Do I reply?" she'd asked when he explained the workings of their communication for the foreseeable future.

"Certainly not," he scoffed. "The messages won't be coming from me directly, so there would be precious little point."

That afternoon in her uncle's sitting room had been utterly depressing. Thea had desperately wanted to ask where he was going and when he thought he

might return, knowing perfectly well that it was pointless. So, in lieu of asking anything, she'd drunk tea and made conversation in Hungarian as best as she

could. Nagging her into multilinguality was her uncle's idea of grief counselling.

"You're improving," Mycroft said. "When I get back I expect you to be ready for a field test."

"Are you going to dump me at the Romanian border and see if I can talk my way to Budapest?" Thea asked morosely.

"Something along those lines." Her uncle sipped and put his cup down. "Don't let your passport expire."

And then, as he saw Thea to the door, for the briefest of moments her uncle's eyes found hers and he stared at her intensely.

"Will you be alright?" he asked.

"That is a pathetic question." Thea held his look. "I'm not a fortune teller and 'alright' is a vague term at best."

"Allow me to rephrase," Mycroft said evenly. "Do you believe Doctor Watson will be able to provide you with adequate care in my absence?"

"Yes. He does so in your presence also, in case you haven't noticed."

"And…" her uncle had looked ever so slightly uncomfortable at the sheer sentiment of it all "…you will look after yourself, of course."

"I'm not about to start cutting myself because you're not having me over for tea every week," Thea had said flatly. "The situation will remain fundamentally

unaltered and I, therefore, will simply carry on. It's really not that difficult."

"Quite so."

For a moment as she walked out of the door Thea thought about giving her uncle a hug or expressing some of the bone cracking terror she felt at the idea that

he might not return for a long time, if at all. For a moment, she had the feeling he might be thinking about the same things – but Mycroft remained perfectly still

by the door, and Thea remained in motion towards the street.

Two days later the circle of junk mail had begun.

Wondering about what her uncle was up to had turned out to be no fun at all, simply because the possibilities were too vast. He could have been anywhere in

the world having unspeakably secret meetings, torturing people, rescuing them…and none of it impacted Thea's day-in-day-out in London.

Aside from the fact that she was now essentially on a spacewalk while Huston was taking a holiday. The fact that Mycroft's absence was making her feel lonely

was humiliating. She wasn't even supposed to like him very much, let alone miss him.

Thea stared at the screen and found herself getting angry. Anger was good. It was much easier to manage than fear, loneliness or sadness. That said, Thea

had found that anger management usually meant she had to find an outlet fast before it started to turn into something more painful.

Her grip on the mouse tightened and she felt the overwhelming urge to rip it from its mooring and toss it across the room. Someone would surely take issue

with that and then she would have a solid fight on her…

Her mobile rang just as the cable connecting mouse to terminal was stretched as taught as it would go.

"Good afternoon," Mary sang. "Where are you?"

"Hackney," Thea grunted.

"Riding?"

"Yes."

"Come meet me for lunch outside the uni, I'm buying."

"I'm alright…"

"I know you are, but I am bored shitless with my reading and need you to liven up my day. I'll be lying on the green on Grantley Street."

"Fine," Thea sighed.

"And hurry up, I'm starving."

So, instead of getting thrown out of the internet place, Thea left at her leisure and pedalled towards Mile End.

()()()()()()()()()

Timing was something like Mary's super power. She had appeared in their lives – well, in John's life really, but by extension naturally also in Thea's – at the

perfect moment. It was difficult to explain…Thea tended to think that the Sherlock-shaped hole ripped into the fabric of their existence had (at least in John's

case) somewhat shrunk until it was no longer a gaping void swallowing all light but rather an opening. The kind that a person could slip through, if they knew

how to, and find themselves almost immediately at the core of everything. Defences had been down, so to speak. Things could have gone hideously wrong,

Thea realised in retrospect, if the one to breach the boundaries had been someone less excellent than Mary.

Because Mary really was excellent, there was no way around it.

"Finally," she shouted across the green at Thea when she came rolling down the street. "I was about to make myself a tent out of these naan breads and

settle in for good."

"I practically broke the sound barrier," Thea protested. "Lance Armstrong wouldn't have made better time."

"Well, I was hoping you'd hold yourself to a higher standard than Lance bloody Armstrong," Mary said haughtily, opening containers of daal and tandoori

chicken.

"The wind then," Thea snapped. "I rode like the wind."

"It's a bit flat though today, isn't it?" Mary passed her a plastic spoon and smiled. Mary smiled a lot and although Thea had always been of the opinion that

frequent smilers were somehow insincere and cheapening their facial expressions, Mary's smiling was miraculously exempt. Infectious, that's what people

called her kind of smile. It had certainly infected John. Thea had always planned to get along with Mary when John decided to formally introduce them, the

thought that she would somehow be a hindrance to John moving on filled her with sick dread. So she was thankful that Mary was easy enough to get along

with.

"Hair looks great," Mary remarked.

"I concur," Thea said with her mouth full. "Lisa's finest work to date."

"You guys all set? Ready to kick yourselves?"

"Huh?" Thea cocked her head.

"You know…" Mary smiled even more. How was it possible? " _Arse_? Kick arse? You're _Arse_ so you-"

"That's awful," Thea snorted, spilling some tandoori on her shirt. "Oh, that's truly horrendous. That's like an old person joke."

Mary was laughing quite hard now.

"No wonder you and John like each other," Thea grumbled, feeling the tug of a grin on the corners of her mouth. "You're both equally lame."

"Hold that attitude til tonight and you'll be just fine," Mary said happily. "Trust no one over thirty and all that. What songs are you playing?"

"Like you would know them."

"That's rich from someone who wasn't even thought of until the very end of the century."

"Fair," Thea conceded. "We're doing _Born to Lose_ , _Dirty Pictures, Don't Tell Mama-_ "

"What, from Cabaret?" Mary interrupted.

"Yea, obviously."

"That's not very hard core."

"You've not heard our version." Thea grinned. "We're doing a Vera Lyn song, too."

"You are not."

"We are."

"Which one?"

" _White Cliffs of Dover_."

"Get out of town!" Mary hooted.

"It shreds," Thea insisted.

"I'm a little sad we're not going tonight, now," said Mary.

"They wouldn't let you in, you're too old."

Mary punched Thea on the arm.

"Child abuser," Thea said affectionately. "Then we got _Brickfield Nights_ , _Molotov Cocktail_ and for the grand finale _Let's do it_ , the Tank Girl version."

"That sounds suitably odd."

"Thank you." Thea shoved the last of the naan in her mouth. "And thanks for the belt, too. It's savage."

"You're welcome." Mary threw the empty containers in a plastic bag. "How are you today anyway?"

"Why d'you ask?" Thea asked a little brasher than intended.

"Because I always found good days could be a little hard," Mary said simply.

Mary didn't have any parents either and it appeared to have made her non-squeamish when it came to grief.

"Alright," Thea said. Just because Mary was at ease with the pains of being alive and alone didn't mean Thea had to be.

()()()()()()()()()()

The Doom Tomb was in a basement. The stage itself was low, but the drums sat on a little pedestal. It was a nod to those old hit parade shows, Marcus

claimed. Thea was certain it was a ploy to make the drummers a little more nervous than the rest of the band. She felt exposed, like she was on top of a

lighthouse, with an excellent view of the whole room. Thankfully, it was pretty dark, the only source of true brightness being the rectangle of the door, the

steps leading down from the upstairs entrance vividly yellow under the bare bulbs, the shapes of people coming and going dark and film noir-ish. Thea gripped

her sticks and snarled at the darkness in front of her.

"Good evening, ladies and wankers," Marcus shouted into the microphone. "We're _Arse_ with a capital 'A' and we were born to lose!"

They launched into their opening number with abandon. Marcus had hammered it into them that, if nothing else, they were going to commit to this evening. If

they went down in flames, so be it, but they would go down like self-obsessed arseholes rather than insecure dipshits. He'd dragged Thea outside for another

joint before they went on, because the sheer excellence of _Cranial Breech_ , who were playing before them, had been simply too much to bear.

Thea was glad for it. She trained her eyes on the door and smashed away like a metronome. There was nothing standing between her and the beat, nothing

at all. This was what she was supposed to be doing for the next half hour and she would bloody well do it to the best of her ability. When the crowd – and it

was a crowd, the Recycling night was always well attended – shouted and clapped and gave them a plethora of rude gestures and threw some empty plastic

cups and some that were not quite empty, she almost fell off her stool. Lisa turned to her with a manic, triumphant grin, a vision in tartan and boots, Marcus

kicked a cup back into the audience with a foot that would have made Johnny Wilkinson jealous. They appeared to be killing it.

"That's right!" Marcus yelled. "You know you love us! You know you love my ladies! You know what you wanna do – you wanna take some…" he took a deep

breath and hollered "…dirty pictures!"

Thea was hitting so hard the sticks were a blur in front of her. Practise, it turned out, was a wonderful thing. She knew the songs so well she could have done

this with both her eyes doused in acid and her feet on fire. She was having a golden moment, a genuinely golden moment.

Lisa took to the microphone for _Don't tell Mama_ and when Thea turned back to the centre of the stage at the end of the song, a pair of boxers were dangling

from the neck of Lisa's bass. It was like a flag for hope. Like the Doom Tomb was a wormhole and on the other side lay some kind of unknown or long forgotten

joy.

They absolutely murdered Vera Lyn. They assassinated _Brickfield Nights._ By the time they started _Molotov Cocktail_ , Thea was positively flying. The intro was her

favourite thing in the world, all drums and bass and machine gun rhythm. The first three rows were jumping. They were seven minutes from victory. People

were stumbling in and out of the luminous door and Thea registered their shapes through a sheen of sweat running into her eyes, sweat that was in all

probability tinting her forehead with fresh dye.

"Why, do we miss you – yes, we do!" Marcus roared. "Father sends his regards to you! When I arrive, well, once in a while – I send my love and a Molotov

cocktail, too!"

The doorway darkened and the room turned upside down. Thea, amazed that her arms just kept on going as her brain simply melted away, vowed never to

smoke weed again. At least not whatever dark magic Marcus was smoking. The silhouette was uncanny. It was some donkey-hipster wearing a wizard's cloak,

it had to be. One of the skinny punk regulars dressed up as a cowboy for a laugh with a dri-za-bone. Whatever it was, it could not be what Thea's mind

insisted it was. What she thought she was seeing, albeit as a faceless black shape standing motionless, framed by the door and blocking the way, was not a

possibility.

"Thank you!" Marcus shouted. "Pardon me, I meant fuck off and will you please salute my lady-love Lisa on the bass…" cat calls rang through the air and Thea

squinted at the shape that was now moving into the room, getting lost in the dark as the spotlight hit the drums and blinded her "…on the drums we have little

orphan A-ni-mal," Thea was aware that the room was sounding appreciative, "and I am Mr Marcus Havisham. We've got one more for you, so strap yourself in!"

When drumming, Thea found it essential to keep her eyes on one spot. Like a juggler. Now, however, as _Let's Do It_ started up, it proved impossible for her to

keep from frantically scanning the room. She needed to see, actually see, this arsehole who'd thrown her with his tall lanky frame, billowing coat and casual

gait. It took absolute priority over making it to the end of the song without fucking up because if she did not see she wouldn't be able to reset her brain and

then she would actually have a the panic attack that was already turning her breathing rapid.

Thea was aware that Marcus and Lisa were shooting her looks but she couldn't do anything about that. She'd explain later, they'd laugh at her and probably

buy her a beer and all would be well. They could stand being a little pissed off for the minute that remained of the song. As they worked up to the final chorus,

Thea threw her head back and screamed in frustration, hoping her drumroll would mask it, making it seem like she was just getting super into it.

When she snapped her head back down, there he was in the second row.

Standing perfectly still. Not even nodding. The sea of roiling bodies around him made him seem stiller yet.

He was looking right at her.

Thea's arms fell limp, a stick clattering to the ground.

Marcus and Lisa exchanged a look and, in a complete moment of improvisational genius, stopped playing abruptly, finishing the last two lines in a dirty

harmony, voices breaking and crackling. The perfection registered somewhere far in the periphery of Thea's mind.

"Beastie, what's wrong?" Marcus had backed up as close as he could to the drums, Lisa was shouting thanks and insults at the crowd.

Thea couldn't do anything. Move, speak, blink, fall over – nothing. She was a prisoner of her stool and of her father's unwavering gaze. He jerked his head to

the left almost imperceptibly, towards the door to the backstage labyrinth and slid out of her field of vision.

"Come on," Marcus hissed.

Dazed, Thea rose, gave the crowd the finger and staggered after Lisa and Marcus off the stage.

"What the fuck was that?" Marcus asked as soon as they were safely behind the partition.

"Are you okay?" Lisa asked. "Jesus, Marcus, what'd you let her have? She's white as the wall."

"Nothing she hasn't had before," Marcus defended himself.

Thea glided past them like a sleepwalker and made for the door to the front of house. The softest tapping came from the other side.

"Bollocks," Thea breathed and wrenched the door open.

"Jesus Christ," Marcus shrieked behind her, so freaked out he even forgot to swear. Lisa gave a little scream.

Thea simply stood and looked at her father. He was a little skinnier that he had been. A little more lined but not much. There was some dried blood caked

around his nostrils. Under his coat he had the same white shirt and black pants he always wore. His eyes were locked onto her, practically clawing at her face.

His expression was oddly serene, with the hint of a smile playing on his lips.

"Let's go get chips, spawn," he said.

The sound of his voice almost undid her. It was like she'd been held under water for two years and was now suddenly permitted to shoot to the surface to

breathe. Like the world became real again. Sherlock's arms were parted slightly, palms upturned, ready to catch her as she flung himself at him. It would be

one of the rare occasions when he would not cringe away from physical affection, perhaps the first one since she'd been a toddler that he was even inviting it.

This was the very moment she'd not allowed herself to daydream about, the fantasy that would have driven her mad, and it was real. The reactions of her

friends behind her were conclusive proof that her father was in fact standing before her in the flesh. Every atom in Thea's body strained to lurch forward,

wanting to be closer, wanting to amalgamate, ideally, and stay attached to him like a barnacle.

"No, thank you," she said politely and, marshalling every bit of willpower she'd ever possessed, slowly and deliberately closed the door.

10


	6. Aftermaths

As the lock of the door clicked into place Thea spun around and sprinted past the wide-eyed, open-mouthed forms of Lisa and Marcus, across the cramped

stuffiness of the backstage room towards the back door. She snatched her backpack off the battered sofa next to the exit, wrenched the door open, raced up

the stairs, through another door and out into the back alley. It was a dead end to the left and chances were good that Sherlock would be approaching from the

right within the next thirty seconds. Thea crossed the alley in four strides, turned the handle on the delivery entrance of an Irish pub, found it unlocked to her

immense relief, dashed inside and slammed the door behind her, sliding the bolt into place for good measure.

She ran along a corridor, ducked through a beaded curtain and found herself behind the bar.

"What the bloody-"

Thea weaved past the startled bartenders, clambered over the low gate separating booze and booze hounds and snaked her way to the front exit. She

emerged onto a busy sidewalk bustling with Saturday night meat marketeers, spotted a bus pulling up at a stop not twenty metres from where she stood and

made a run for it. Twenty seconds later the bus was on its way and Thea was crouching next to a seat, suddenly aware of just how much adrenalin was

coursing through her. For a moment she thought she was going to be ill, but being thrown off the bus would not do at all, not for a few stops at least.

"Bloody hell," Thea muttered in an effort to ground herself. "Bloody, buggering hell of bollocks…"

She had to call John.

Certain that she'd lost her father – for the moment – Thea rose and sat on the seat proper, rifling through her backpack for her phone. It was flashing

frantically, announcing she had 47 missed calls, 23 messages. Apparently she had not been her father's first port of call. John had called her 31 times in the last

hour, Mary had called 15 times…and one single, solitary tiny little missed call was labelled 'Mycroft'. Thea had been about to move on to the messages but her

mind ground to a halt violently.

Mycroft.

Mycroft had called. From his own phone. Therefore, Mycroft was back. It seemed a stretch that her uncle and her father should resurface on the same evening

coincidentally. Therefore, they had returned together. Therefore, the aim of her uncle's ever so secret mission had to have been the retrieval of her father.

Therefore…Thea kicked the seat in front of her so hard it jarred her ankle…her uncle had been perfectly aware that her father was still in the land of the living.

 _Motherfucker…_

Granted, it was possible – just – that Mycroft had only learned of Sherlock's being NOT DEAD a few months prior, leading him to take steps to bring his brother

back to London. That _said_ , disappearing as comprehensively as her father had done was bound to have taken some serious fudging of paperwork and _that_

would have been a hell of a lot easier with the assistance of the government. _There-bloody-for_ , it was well within reason to assume that Mycroft had known the

entire time.

The English language provided no words strong enough to express Thea's outrage, so in lieu of roaring abuse at the world, her jaw seized up.

With shaking fingers Thea scrolled through the messages. They were alternately from John and Mary, starting with variations on 'Call me' and 'Answer the

damn phone' and ending in permutations of 'Don't move, we're coming to get you'.

The phone rang and Thea nearly dropped it in fright. The screen read 'private number' so it was either her uncle calling from a phone that was not his personal

mobile or, much more likely, her father. Either way, she wasn't answering. Instead she turned the phone off and tossed it back in the bag.

She drew up her knees and stared out of the window into the streaky darkness. Feelings were somersaulting through her like trapeze artists, bad ones, the

kind that collided with one another and crashed down before bouncing back up from the safety net.

Thea dug a battered A4 notebook from her bag, the words **Mechanics of Emotion** written in black marker on the cover. She flicked through the pages until she

found an alphabetised index of feelings, something she'd laboured on and poured over in the early months after Sherlock's death… _disappearance_ , Thea

corrected herself, not death, no death had occurred….anyway, it had been part of her many attempts to unravel what was going on inside her.

Confusion, Thea had realised in the weeks and months after the funeral (a funeral, the bloody bastard, they'd had a funeral and everything), was just what

lazy people called the rush of warring emotions. Confusion was what you said you felt when you were too chickenshit to examine what you were actually

feeling. Confusion was bullshit.

Thea closed her eyes and focussed on the circus in her head and chest, calling the performers to order. The first and foremost among them was a profound

feeling of relief. As soon as Thea admitted this to herself a wave of annoyance crashed over her. She was supposed to have arranged herself with her new

circumstance, she was _supposed_ to be this cryptic thing of 'alright' – she had been, or at least she thought she had been, and now this overwhelming, warming,

 _elating_ sensation of relief suggested that she had in fact spent every moment of every day since her father's death…bollocks…disappearance (!) wanting him

back. Being relieved in this situation was the mark of a truly pathetic individual.

Relief was closely followed by an icy rush of disbelief. It wasn't that Thea had any trouble believing her father was alive – conclusive proof had been delivered

and even when she'd finally spotted him in the second row she'd not for a second entertained the notion that she was looking at a ghost or whatever spiritual

equivalent one might call it. What defied her belief was the idea that he could have allowed her to think he was dead for the past two years. _Two years_.

Whatever his reasons might have been – and Thea was sure they had been very, very legitimate – she struggled to imagine any scenario that would have

prevented him from returning from the dead after a few months at the most. Or at the very least send some kind of word, even if he was in the middle of

something. Two years seemed excessive. Things changed in two years, people changed in two years. She had gone from not quite thirteen to as good as

fifteen adjusting to her new identity as an orphan, with great fucking difficulty, and now…what?

Disbelief bled, finally, into blessed anger. (Anger was the first emotion on her list, followed by anguish and apprehension, and it was accompanied by a tiny

asterisk, marking it as a manageable emotion. Other asterisked states of mind included boredom, disenchantment and melancholy.)

The unbelievable bastard. The complete, thoughtless, twenty-carat arsehole! How dare he show up during the best moment she'd had – bar none – since he'd

decided it would be wise to pretend to be dead and have the gall to ask her for chips? No hello. No apology. No tears of joy to see her even. Nothing. Bloody

chips! Perhaps not all people changed in two years.

And – AND! – he'd not even come to see her first! He'd clearly been to see John, likely ballsing up his proposal to Mary, and only then had he deigned to see his

only child. The child who had been punching her way uphill through battalions of triggers and memories and sad, sad, _sad_ thoughts for over seven-hundred

days and nights…well, sod him.

Thea let out a breath and opened her eyes. Beside the bus, keeping level with her seat by the window, a black car was cruising along. Of course it was. Well.

To hell with her uncle, too. She could keep his goons riding alongside until they ran out of petrol, this was an all-night line after all.

()()()()()()()

The timeline took up a double page of her notebook. On the left was Sherlock and John's day on the right Thea's day.

At eight in the morning she had left the empty flat through the back door, because the press was camped out the front.

Sherlock and John had been holed up in the lab at Bart's.

At ten-thirty Thea went on her first break and sat on her own staring at her phone contemplating giving her father a call to see if she should go home after

school or if an evacuation plan had been put into place. After all, there had been some serious police drama the night before…the possibility of her going to

stay with her uncle had been discussed briefly but there had been no time to make a proper plan of action. She decided against it. Sherlock was likely up to his

eyeballs in damage control and wouldn't be of any help at all.

At eleven Thea went into double physics.

At the same time, John got word that Mrs Hudson had been shot and was in critical condition.

At eleven-oh-five John stormed out of the lab.

Thea calculated the velocity of horizontal propulsion.

At eleven-ten her father sent a text message.

Thea stared out of the window and watched a dog wandering in the school yard to relieve himself.

At eleven-thirty her father climbed the stairs to the roof of the hospital.

John arrived at Baker Street to find Mrs Hudson having tea with the builder.

Thea started reading the biography of Ian Drury under her desk.

At eleven-forty-five a James Moriarty aka Rich Brook blew his brains out on the roof.

John was in a taxi back to the hospital.

Thea got hungry and wondered what she would have for lunch.

At eleven-fifty-one Sherlock stood on the edge of the roof.

At eleven-fifty-two John jumped out of the cab and his phone started ringing.

At eleven-fifty-three Thea walked to the whiteboard and wrote out some formulae at Mrs Friedman's request.

As she attempted to make her writing somewhat legible, John attempted to talk her father off the edge of the roof.

At eleven-fifty-five Sherlock jumped.

Thea sat down. (It amazed her in a twisted way that she had continued to live as though nothing had changed for exactly fifteen minutes after her life had

been altered so drastically. For those fifteen minutes she had truly existed in a parallel universe. Somehow she wished she could have appreciated it as it was

happening.)

At eleven-fifty-seven John was scrabbling to get closer to the shattered body on the sidewalk.

At eleven-fifty-eight Thea went to the bathroom.

At twelve-oh-three Sherlock was being wheeled into the bowels of the hospital.

John was being wrestled by some orderlies in order to have a graze on his head examined.

At twelve-oh-five Thea returned to the classroom.

At twelve-ten the principal pulled her out of class.

At twelve-eleven she was sprinting towards the black car idling at the gates.

At twelve-sixteen she bolted across the street to the hospital entrance.

At twelve-seventeen she stood in front of the reception cubicle.

("Holmes," she panted. The nurse clicked and typed. "Holmes, Elizabeth or Holmes, William?" she asked. Thea choked out "William" and dreaded to think what

condition her father had been in when he was admitted, if he'd been unable to inform them of his preferred first name.)

At twelve-nineteen Thea burst through the door of the family room on the fourth floor and the timelines aligned. She entered the new universe. John was

slumped on a chair, head in hands and her uncle was standing stiffly by the window.

"What's going on?" Thea demanded.

"Your father has died," Mycroft said simply and John gave muffled groan from inside the fortress of his hands.

"He's dead," Thea said.

"He has died," her uncle repeated.

"You mean he's been killed."

"He has died."

"You're saying it wrong," Thea insisted.

"I am not."

"You are! He's been murdered. He's gone. He's passed away…"

"He has died."

"You're saying it wrong, uncle Mycroft, you're-"

"I'm so, so very sorry, child, I can't say it another way."

At twelve-twenty-two Thea's legs gave way and she hit her head on a chair before her uncle could catch her.

()()()()()()

Many months later, during one of their joined therapy sessions, John would try to explain to Thea about the 'Dead Parrot' sketch by Monty Python and how

much the exchange between Thea and Mycroft had reminded him of it. Thea, in turn, tried to explain about the 'Code of Eventualities'.

()()()()()

During the height of what Thea and Mycroft had termed 'The Wilderness Years' – a period of time when Sherlock was restless and looking for distraction in all

the wrong places – Sherlock's tendency to annoy the wrong people had reached an all-time high. Angry muscle was hammering on the door at all hours

demanding outstanding payment for 'distractions' and Thea was frequently lifted out of windows to make hasty getaways over fire escapes. Once they were in

the clear, father and daughter would ride the tube for hours until it seemed safe to go home.

During one of those long nights of public transport, Sherlock brought up the possibility of feigning his own death.

"Like Huckleberry Finn?" Thea asked.

"Huckleberry Finn didn't fake his death," Sherlock corrected. "People just assumed he was dead, it wasn't intentional. Do you understand the difference?"

"Yes," Thea lied.

"No, you don't." Her father sighed. "The main difference would be that people would have to believe I was dead forever."

"Everyone?"

"No, not everyone. But certainly those impolite gorillas who've been bothering us."

"What about Uncle Mycroft?"

"As tempting as it is, it would probably be more convenient to have him on side."

"Gran and Grumps?"

"I suppose they would have to be in on it, too."

"What about me?"

Sherlock looked at her closely.

"That depends," he said. "How well can you keep a secret?"

Thea scoffed with all the disdain a six-year-old could possibly be capable of.

"Think about it," Sherlock continued. "If the gorillas cornered you and did lots of shouting and hairy knuckle-cracking, could you keep your mouth shut and not

give the game away?"

"Naturally," The snapped. She'd lied to them about Sherlock's being home successfully more than once, even if it made her feel like her skin was going to

bubble up and float away, leaving her a raw shape of muscle and exposed flesh.

Her father made a little humming sound.

Thea swung her legs, thinking. It was important to think about things, think them all the way through. Otherwise things tended to go wrong. Sometimes that

was alright and what seemed like disaster was actually just a gateway to something better; but other times wrong was just that: wrong. It took her all the

way to White City to finish her thought.

"How would I know?" she asked.

"How would you know what exactly?" Her father's eyes were closed, his head rested against the wall, but Thea could tell by a slight twitching of his hands that

he was getting bored again.

"How would I know that you're just pretending?" Thea knelt up on the seat and brought her face close to his ear so she could talk quietly, so they wouldn't be

overheard. Because one never know who might be listening. Even in an empty train there could be things. Devices. And cameras everywhere. "I might not be

there when you have to do it. I might be in school. You might not be home when you have to do it. How would I know it's not real?"

Very slowly Sherlock opened his eyes and turned his head to look at her. Sometimes, not often though, he looked at Thea a certain way that was hard to

explain. It made her feel like she was pressed between microscope slides. As though she was a particularly interesting specimen. He looked at her as though

she was a rare breed of bee, the kind he'd always wanted to examine in depth.

"Excellent question."

She looked at him expectantly.

"Well, let's see if you can come up with a solution," her father said, suddenly bright and enthusiastic. "Okay…"

"If I were to die – real or otherwise – what would be the first thing to happen to you?"

"Someone would come get me."

"For example…"

Thea scrunched up her face.

"Depends," she said. "If I was at school it'd be a teacher, I guess. But it could also be the police, if I was home alone. Or Judith from downstairs."

"Very good. What next?"

"Uhm…I don't-"

"Don't say 'I don't know'," Sherlock interrupted. "Not allowed. Think. Who do people call when there's an emergency? _In case of emergency_?"

Thea blushed. She did not enjoy it when he spelled things out for her.

"The emergency contact," she muttered. "The next of kid."

" _Kin_."

"I said that!"

"You did not."

"Fine. The next of _kin._ "

"Which in our case is…"

"Uncle Mycroft."

Her father nodded.

"So," he said. "You are with the police or with your teacher or with Judith downstairs, who naturally won't have told you anything useful because you are a

child. Then Mycroft arrives."

The Greenford stop was announced before Thea spoke again.

"Alright," she said, taking a deep breath. "So. Uncle Mycroft would be the one to tell me what has happened. But we might not be alone when he does it. There

might be other people. They are maybe not meant to know that you are okay, but I need to know. So what we need to do it to have a way for uncle Mycroft to

tell me that you are not dead without telling anyone else in the room. A code."

Sherlock dug into his coat pocket and produced a Snickers.

"If you finish without assistance, you can have this all to yourself," he said.

Thea felt as though her brain might crack her skull, she was concentrating so hard.

"He will tell me you are dead," Thea said slowly, "so everyone else in the room thinks that's what is happening. But I will know it's not true…"

Her father waved the chocolate bar like a magic wand.

"…because…" she stalled. This was much trickier than she'd thought.

"What's the problem?"

"Will we know in advance how you're going to pretend you'll die?"

"Specify."

"Will you pretend to be hit by a car? Or struck by lightning? Or drown? Or burn? Or-"

"I see," Sherlock grinned. "No, we probably won't know. It'll be dependent on the situation."

"So that's difficult," Thea frowned.

"Why?"

"Because if I tell uncle Mycroft that the code is "He has drowned in the Thames" and then you pretend to get stabbed instead, that won't work at all."

"Very true."

Thea thought. She even put her fingertips together and made a little tent under her chin like her father often did, but it didn't seem to make any difference.

When they passed Ruislip Gardens, inspiration struck. She turned to Sherlock and was surprised to find him watching her with what appeared to be rapt

interest.

"Dazzle me," he said.

"Okay," Thea took a deep breath. "I had it wrong, see. We don't need a code for when you _don't_ die."

Her father's eyes lit up a little but he waited patiently for her to continue.

"We need a code for when you _do_ die, see, because then uncle Mycroft can tell me anything in front of anyone and I'll act very upset but I'll know it's not

actually true _unless_ he says the code phrase. For example…if we say that if you really die he says 'your father has died', just for example, then I know any

other way he says it is a lie. So then, he can say whatever, apart from that one sentence and I'll not really worry and only pretend. Like you."

Without a word Sherlock handed over the chocolate bar.

"Was it good?" Thea asked, vaguely aware she was fishing for compliments as she ripped the wrapper open.

"That," her father said with his most serious voice, "was excellent."

Of course, nothing of the sort had come to pass. Thea had told Mycroft quite excitedly about her genius scheme, he had gotten quite mad, done some stern

talking about 'unnecessary drama' and 'charades of espionage', and made two phone calls and one transaction which made the gorillas go away. There had

never been a need for one of Thea's earliest artworks of thought.

()()()()()()()()

Only of course there had been. Thea kicked the seat in front of her again and one more time as hard as she could. The sheer audacity of them! They'd had a

plan in place for this scenario, this very bloody thing and they had elected to deceive her. They had not trusted her to keep stumm, they had not thought her

capable of living with this knowledge without arousing suspicions of third parties. They had lied to her; her uncle had stood there in his stupid suit in the stupid

family room and he had lied to her face. He'd gone through the trouble of remembering the code only to use it against her. How-

Thea's anger flipped and turned on her. Why did this even surprise her? She had to be completely stupid! What had led her to believe that her father and uncle

would ever include her in anything that extended beyond their stupid curriculum? What had given her the idea that they cared whether or not they caused her

pain? Why would she matter?

While she was aware that she was being melodramatic and indulgent of quite a bit of self-pity (both of which were in the index of emotions inside the

notebook she was now clutching with white knuckles), this awareness did little to assuage her fury. Imbecile…she was a complete imbecile…but they were still

arseholes. They were fucking monstrous. They'd knowingly thrown her into the deepest pit of sadness, Mycroft had bloody watched her suffer for months and

months and all that time he had the power to release her from her grief. Instead he'd made her learn German and Italian and fucking Hungarian and rubbished

her with book deliveries.

Of course they would have a rational explanation for this. They'd have a rational explanation for anything. Those two could justify setting a home for blind

orphans on fire without as much as a twinge of moral discomfort. Yet somehow Thea doubted they would be able to convince her that this was an acceptable

situation.

She dug her headphones out of her bag, plugged her ears against the rumbling of the bus, gave the black car beside the window the finger and settled in for

the ride.


	7. Angles

By the time they got to the final stop, the bus driver was watching Thea intently. She gave him her best version of a reassuring smile. He returned a slightly

pained version of his own and pulled up to the curb. The engine idled for a moment, then turned off. The driver slowly got out of his seat and walked towards

Thea with the bone-weariness of the nightshift worker.

"Love, I can't let you sleep here."

Thea removed her headphones.

"I'm not sleeping," she pointed out.

He sighed.

"I'm not supposed to let you spend the night either."

"I'm not _spending the night_. I'm just a passenger. Look. Here. Oyster card and all."

The driver took a deep breath. Thea squinted at him. When he'd started driving busses he'd thought it would be an interim solution while he got himself a

decent degree in business. Of course everyone had a degree in business by the time he was finished and driving busses had somehow turned into his

livelihood. In order to keep himself from plummeting into a brutal depression over the load of nothing his life was quickly amounting to, he had formed a whole

philosophy around bus driving.

The beauty of assisting people to get where they needed to be. His invaluable contribution to easing emissions and congestion. His duty to keep public

transport pleasant and savoury for his passengers. He would rather eat broken glass than let a vagrant teenager ride the bus til dawn, oyster card or not. His

principles wouldn't allow it. Other people's principles could be quite a drag.

That said, he wouldn't abandon her in Chingford or wherever they were, not in the middle of the night. This was a decent man with daughters of his own,

daughters who had made him key rings out of little pearls when they were children – two worse for wear crocodiles adorned the keys he had reattached to a

safety chain dangling from his belt loop – and now worried him with their increasingly adult demeanours. He would want random people to watch out for them

whenever he could not…and he would watch out for Thea. Inconvenient to say the least.

As far as Thea could see, there were three likely outcomes to this situation. One, she could argue and be obstinate and the driver would likely call in some form

of authority to have her safely returned home. Two, she could pretend that this was her stop, get off and be collected by her uncle's henchmen, who were

currently parked on the opposite side of the street. Three, her preferred option, she would talk him into taking her back to town; it would take over an hour

and inconvenience the goons and by extension her uncle. All she'd need to do was tug on his heart strings a little bit and the man was practically a double

bass.

"Are you alright, love?"

Thea made her lower lip wobble with remarkable ease.

"It's stupid," she sniffed. "It's the most stupid night of my life…"

"There now…" the bus driver sank onto the isle seat opposite her and his features slid into an expression of calm and caring practically on their own accord.

This man, Thea understood, spent an extraordinary amount of time listening to his children. Attempting to comprehend why things were important to them,

even if they seemed trivial to him, and intent – absolutely intent – on never making them feel like their opinions and thoughts and worries didn't matter.

"I'm meant to be sleeping at my friend's house," Thea blubbered, completely undone by his concern. "We went out and we had a fight and she stormed off and

now it's just really late and I want to go home so badly but my dad's gonna kill me…I'm not even meant to be out at all…it's just so stupid…"

The bus driver smiled. It was a genuine smile, much like Mary's. Thea wondered if people could teach themselves to smile like this.

"That's not so bad, love," he said. "Where d'you live?"

"Peckham."

"Right. That's a not round the corner, is it." The driver's smile never wavered. "But that's alright."

"It's all…just…stupid…" Thea had her face in her hands and to her immense horror realised she was properly crying.

"Can I make a suggestion?"

She nodded, unable to stop the onslaught of tears.

"Give your dad a call. Tell him you'll be at Charing Cross in an hour and twelve minutes precisely."

"I can't-"

"I guarantee you he'll come to pick you up," the driver said. "And not just that, he'll be happy you called him, even if he's a little mad."

"You don't know that," Thea sniffed. "What if he's a horrible abuser who'll beat me senseless?"

"Is he?" Something in the driver's face suggested he knew this was not the case. Thea supposed that if you spent all your time on public transport you got to

see a fair cross section of people and were bound to develop some skill reading them. Perhaps being a bus driver could actually be kind of fun that way.

"No," she admitted. "But he'll still be annoyed."

"And pleased," the driver insisted. "He'll be pleased you made a sensible choice when things went pear shaped instead of doing something stupid to cover up."

"I _am_ on a bus in the far out suburbs," Thea pointed out. "I think we've passed the point of not doing anything stupid."

"Perhaps." The driver grinned. "But it's still well within salvaging range."

Thea sighed and dug out her phone. She turned it back on. There were another seventeen missed calls from John, the most persistent man in the world, and a

cluster of text messages to the tune of "Where the hell are you? Are you alive?" the last of which had been sent not ten minutes ago.

The bus driver made no move to give her space.

"I've got daughters," he said when he noticed her staring at him. "I know it seems a little much but I just want to be sure you actually call. I don't want to drop

you in the middle of town at three in the morning and there be no one to come get you."

"Fair enough," Thea muttered.

John picked up on the first ring.

"Are you alri- uninjured?" he asked urgently.

"Yea," Thea said, feeling decidedly sheepish all of a sudden. "I'm on a bus."

"What bus?" She could hear John moving and the jangling of keys. "Where to?"

"Well, it's in Chingwell now…but it's going back to town pretty much now. So…uhm…"

The movement on the other end of the line stopped and the keys grew quiet. John had been about to run out of the front door but he wasn't anymore.

"I'll come pick you up," he said and the relief in his voice was enough to make Thea tear up again. This crying business wouldn't do at all…but she couldn't really

help it.

"Uhm…okay…" She wiped her eyes and the driver produced a tissue from one of his many pockets. "We'll be at Charing Cross at like…"

"Three-oh-five," the driver mouthed at her.

"…five past three. Are you-"

"Absolutely," John cut her off. "I'll see you really soon, Thea. We'll wrap our heads 'round this. Alright?"

"Alright," she whispered.

The bus driver beamed at her when she hung up.

"What did I tell you? You girls don't realise the power you have. No matter how tough your daddies might act, you could destroy them a thousand different

ways. Irreparably destroy them. I suppose it's a good thing you're not aware."

He rose and made his way to the front, key rings bobbing up and down.

"Want to sit up here with me?" he called over his shoulder as he started up the engine. "It's pretty dead around this time, I doubt we'll have anyone join us."

Tentatively Thea picked up her bag and took a new seat in the very front row. She never sat at the front of the bus, at least not downstairs.

"What did you mean?" she asked after they'd driven through the dead suburban darkness for a good ten minutes, trailed at a safe distance by the black car.

"About what?" The driver kept his eyes on the road.

"When you said daughters could destroy their fathers a thousand different ways."

"Just that. There are many things a girl can do to finish her daddy completely."

"Okay…but surely that's the same for sons and mothers, sons and fathers, daughters and mothers," Thea could feel frown lines cutting in between her

eyebrows. "Why single out daughters and fathers? There can't possibly be a difference in the intensity of relationships."

The driver laughed.

"It depends on how you see it," he said. "I mean, I have three girls" (Thea hrmpfed, she'd assumed he had only two, one key ring from each) "and one son.

And I love them all. To death. Equally. But that said, I worry about my girls more."

"Because they're physically weaker?"

"No. I don't think that's necessarily it." The driver thought for a while, which Thea appreciated. Quick answers were often platitudinous rubbish and it was nice

to see someone put some mental effort into avoiding this sort of thing.

"I think," the driver took a red light as an opportunity to make eye contact for a moment, "it's because I do see myself in them, just as I do in my son, but

because they are women, or will be soon, I can't quite comprehend how that will work out for them. They are like me in a completely different way from me.

Does that make sense?"

"Possibly," Thea said slowly. "Have you thought about this a lot?"

"A _lot_. It's one of the things I think about the most, my children."

"How could they destroy you exactly?" Thea ploughed on. "I mean, what's the very worst thing?"

"There is no one worst thing," the driver said. "They could get themselves hooked on drugs, get into abusive relationships, die in freak accidents…they could

become Arsenal supporters…"

Thea giggled against her will.

"Or you know," the driver was emboldened now, on something of a roll, "there are so many families who are this thing people call 'estranged'. Won't talk to

each other. Won't visit. It's sad. Then again, maybe it's not as bad as families treating each other as politely as they would treat strangers…who knows.

Actually, that might be the worst thing my children could do to me, deny me access to their true selves. No longer be unguarded around me. That would be

terrible."

"Wow," Thea breathed before she could stop herself. "Sir, you may have been the best person I could have possibly met today."

"That's a lovely thing to say. What's your name, love?"

"Annie."

He gave her a somewhat dubious look.

"Well, Anastasia, really," Thea sighed.

"Only on Sundays, I suppose?"

"Yea. Sort of. How old are your daughters?"

"The youngest is eight, my twins are seventeen and my boy is fourteen. Lively household, I tell you. D'you have siblings?"

"No, it's just me."

The driver whistled through his teeth.

"You hold all the power then. Don't take it lightly."

"I'm not," Thea said solemnly. "Believe me, I'm not."

()()()()()()()

By the time they got to Charing Cross Thea could have written a book, a novella at least, about the exploits of the bus driver's lively household. The youngest

daughter especially was clearly in training to become an absolute hellraiser under the tuition of her older siblings.

"D'you see your dad?" the driver asked as he pulled into the terminal.

"Right there." Thea pointed to John who was leaning against the car, parked illegally in a loading zone, take away cup in hand, watching the bus traffic with

concentration.

"He doesn't look so mad."

"No, I guess not." Thea picked up her bag and held out her hand. "Thank you. This turned out to be a pretty interesting night."

The driver smiled once more and shook her hand firmly.

"Sleep well," he said.

"Drive safe."

Thea climbed out of the bus and jogged through the drizzle towards John. He looked a little wired, which was not a huge surprise considering the events of the

past few hours.

"I needed time to think," Thea said in answer to his unspoken question.

"Any results?" he asked.

"Quite."

They got into the car and started towards home…their place…the other…bollocks. Thea was touched to see a second takeaway cup wobbling in the decrepit

cup holder on the passenger side.

"So," she said after she'd taken a fortifying sip, "are you getting married?"

"I am…uhm, we are."

"Congratulations."

They drove for a few minutes in silence.

"So," John said finally. "Is there anything else about tonight you think we should talk about?"

Thea cleared her throat.

"I know I promised you there wouldn't be any silliness tonight," she said. "But I didn't actually get arrested or anything, so I don't think-"

"Thea."

"I'm sorry if I worried you, truly."

"No." John's profile was growing increasingly irritated. "I mean, that's okay. Fair enough. I was thinking more along the lines of your father's return from the

dead."

"Ah." Thea drew herself up in her seat a little taller. "Yes. That."

"Yes." John shot her a sideways glance. "That."

"That was quite something," Thea said calmly.

John waited for more for three intersections.

"Right," he said when it became clear that Thea was going to volunteer nothing more. "So, I physically attacked him. Punched him. I may have given him a

Glasgow kiss."

That certainly explained the dried blood. Thea supressed a smile. Good on John. Way to express his feelings.

"What did he say to you?" John asked.

"He said we should get chips."

"Ah. And then?"

"I told him no thank you."

"Okay…" John was pinching the bridge of his nose. "And then?"

"That was it."

"That was it?"

"Yea. Anyway," Thea drained the rest of her tea and twisted around in her seat a bit to face him, "did Mary totally know it was coming? Because if she did I

swear I didn't breathe a word. Did she cry?"

"She might have known," John said, a smile flickering around his lips. "She didn't let on though, not much. She may have nudged me along a little…didn't cry

though."

"Did you?"

"Haha…oy, you're just trying to distract me, aren't you."

"No," Thea said emphatically. "I'm genuinely invested in your and Mary's relationship. We'll be living together full time…actually, when is she moving in for good?

Before the wedding I presume? Are we going to move house?"

"Stop-"

"I know, I know…drowning before I go swimming."

"No-"

"I don't really mind if we move, so long as you find something with an equally excellent or better basement than the current one."

"What's your game?" John asked sharply.

"I need a basement for the drums and the chemistry stuff, obviously. It's literally the only requirement. You can choose the suburb, you can pick the style, you

can-"

"Thea!"

"John."

"You're being- oh, I see…"

"Do you?" she asked with genuine interest.

"Look, I'm angry as well-"

"Please, spare me," Thea snapped. "You're not angry, you're just a little miffed. You've gotten the worst out of your system when you punched him and you'll

always have the satisfaction of not just resuming business as usual straight away, but you won't last. A week. Maybe two. You've missed working with him,

probably more than living with him and now you can have the best of both worlds. Actually, I give you ten days exactly."

"I-"

"And that's fine," Thea went on. "It's no problem. You do what you need to do. But you don't get to tell me how to handle this, you don't even get to advise

me."

"You can't avoid him forever," John pointed out.

"I don't want to _avoid_ anyone."

"You'll have to speak with him eventually."

"I have no problem speaking to him. Have him over for dinner, invite him to the wedding – I won't bolt every time I see him coming, but that does not mean I'm

prepared to go live at Baker Street again. I won't do that even if you elect to terminate our arrangement-"

"I won't," John growled, sounding rather offended.

"Thank you," Thea allowed. "That's going to make things much easier."

"It's going to make what much easier, exactly?"

They were pulling up in front of the house now.

"Keeping calm and carrying on, of course," Thea said smoothly.

"That's great," muttered John and nodded towards the front door.

Standing tall like some kind of elongated clay soldier, coat billowing a little in the breeze, stood Sherlock.

()()()()()()()

"Good morning," he said as Thea and John trotted up the front steps.

"Piss off," John grumbled.

"Good morning," said Thea.

John unlocked the door and Sherlock followed them inside without invitation, surveying the ground floor with the expert eye of a real estate assessor.

"Well, this is distressingly ordinary," he announced after a moment's contemplation. "How do you stand it?"

"We stand it just fine." John had hung his jacket and made a beeline for the kettle. It was an almost Pavlovian response to company, Thea mused as she

studiously ignored her father's rather intrusive gaze.

"Do you commute together?" Sherlock asked with a pronounced note of distaste. "Does John drop you at the tube station on his way to work?"

"Yes," Thea said lightly. He didn't, he never once had. Thea rode to school and back every day, although it took her almost an hour. Even in the rain that was

infinitely better than sharing a train with downtrodden office workers. John was either too absorbed in his tea ceremony to notice her lie or had decided to

simply let her do this as she deemed best.

Sherlock wandered over to the month-a-page calendar on the kitchen wall.

"JOC –John on call," he stage-murmured. "TA – Thea away. MNS – Mary night shift. PTE…good God, John, surely you don't attend these?"

"I do, actually," John ground out between gritted teeth, though Thea couldn't help but notice he'd put three cups on the counter.

" _Ale_ thea away…" Sherlock said pensively. "Where did you go?"

"Overnight excursion." Thea opened a cabinet and handed John a plastic container of sugar.

"Where to?"

"Stonehenge." She pulled out a chair and sat down at the table, reaching for an open packet of biscuits that had been abandoned in its centre.

"And how, pray tell, was that?"

"Educational," Thea said, examining her biscuit. "The weather was average."

No one but Thea would have noticed the minute wince her father was unable to suppress and it gave her tremendous satisfaction. She accepted the cup of tea

John pushed across the table towards her, put her biscuit down and wrapped her hands around it, pleased to have something substantial to hold. There would

be no fidgeting, she told herself firmly and when she left the room in a while she would not as much glance towards the door concealing the steps to the

basement.

They drank tea in silence, the buzzing from the fridge seemed unnaturally loud.

"Would you like to know where I've been?" Sherlock asked finally.

"I doubt you'd be at liberty to tell us," Thea answered and drained her cup. "Well, I'm off to bed. Night, John."

"Night, Thea." John sounded a little strangled.

"Good night, Mr Holmes. Nice to see you."

"Really?" Her father cocked his eyebrow at her. He was amused. For now.


	8. Morning After

Thea made herself sleep. She lay perfectly still with her eyes closed and thought of blank sheets of paper until her mind and body shut down to escape the

boredom. It took pretty fierce focus to do this without her brain getting away from her, but focus came easy that night. Thea felt like a freshly sharpened pencil,

a stake pointed straight at the revenant's heart.

She woke to the relentless ringing of her mobile on the bedside table. She groped blindly and picked up without opening her eyes properly.

"What?" she grunted.

"What the hell happened last night?" Lisa shouted so loudly Thea had to hold the phone away from her ear.

"I went for a bus ride and then I went to bed." Thea scrambled into an upright position and leaned against the headboard. "Rather late, I might add. What

time is it?"

"Who cares? Your…what the bloody hell?"

"I know," Thea said with a yawn. "It's a bit like that."

"Where is she?" Marcus yelled in the background.

"I'm home, Marcus," Thea yelled back. "Put me on speaker, Lees. Anyway. Sorry for running off."

"By all means," Lisa said darkly. "I nearly had a heart attack, I can't imagine how you're feeling."

"Alright."

" _Alright?_ Are you fucking kidding me?"

"I'm alright."

"Well," Marcus piped up again, "if you're alright, whatever that entails, are you receptive to some absolutely unrelated excellent news?"

"Marcus!" Lisa snapped. "Her father's just returned from the dead-"

"What good news?" Thea interrupted.

"Sitting down?"

"Yea…"

"We're going to Kindergarten in December."

"You're joking!"

'Kindergarten' was a weekly event dedicated to bands whose members were collectively under the age of 21, held at the Death Trap, one of the better known

shitholes of the inner city. Every month four bands were chosen to attend Kindergarten and played four shows consecutively, their set lists comprised of online

requests sent into the venue's website. It was gimmicky, sure, but mainly it was excellent fun. Thea, Marcus and Lisa had gone to see Kindergarten gigs

religiously for months.

"I am certainly not," Marcus huffed.

"Get the fuck out of town!" Thea let out a shrill scream and kicked off the blankets.

Her door flew open and John burst in, bathrobe flying, brandishing – absurdly – the iron.

"What-" he started and stopped when he realised the room was free of intruders, familial and otherwise.

"I call you later," Thea said quickly and hung up, tossing the phone into her tangled sheets. "Morning, John."

"What's going on now?" The iron was dangling uselessly by John's side and he eyed Thea with some trepidation. "Do I want to know?"

"Just some band stuff…" Thea trailed off. "No, actually, bloody amazing band stuff. We've got booked for four gigs next month."

"What, paid gigs?"

"Yea…well, they pay in beverage tokens, but with the price of a pint being what it is-"

John's attempt to force his features into a semblance of a sincere smile was so captivating, Thea stopped speaking to watch him.

"You don't have to pretend like you get it," she said warmly. "You're an old person."

"Thanks."

"Why would that offend you? You are – from my perspective – an old person; and not the kind who've lived a wild life of musical adventures. Keith Richards

would get it and he's older than you…isn't he?"

"Yes, Thea." John was rubbing the bridge of his nose like a magic lamp.

"What was my point…oh yes, so, there's nothing wrong with being an old person, it's just who you are and that's fine. I don't need you to feign interest or

understanding for my passions to validate them. That said, if you could excuse me from school on the days after the gigs I'd really appreciate it."

"Yea…okay. Now. Listen, Thea…are you actually planning on not acknowledging what happened yesterday _at all_?"

Thea rolled her eyes and picked yesterday's jeans up off the floor.

"Obviously that's not an option," she said. "Could you go outside and tell the driver I need five minutes?"

John directed his gaze towards the window and frowned.

"There isn't a car," he pointed out.

"There will be by the time you get downstairs."

"Yea?"

"Guaranteed." Thea rummaged through her washing basket for a crumpled T-shirt. "Five minutes."

"Fair enough," John said a little uncertainly and left, iron still in hand.

Thea watched the black car pull up forty seconds later and wondered if her room was bugged for both sound and vision.

She dressed, contemplating changing her t-shirt for something that would bare her midriff and decided against it. The project that was beginning to take up

most of her midsection was, as far as she was aware, not something her uncle (and therefore her father) knew about; and while it might have been amusing

to possibly shock and definitely appal them, it was not at all in keeping with her plan to keep their businesses separate.

Four minutes later she called out a "see you later" to John and walked down the driveway to meet with her ride.

When the car dropped her at the Diogenes Club rather than at Mycroft's place or Baker Street, Thea was inordinately pleased. There was something gratifying

about showing up at one of the last bastions of Old English Etiquette looking like a cross between Tank Girl and Sid Vicious. She strutted into the silent reading

room with booming footfall and announced her presence to the concierge manning the desk loudly, stressing her last name for maximum exposure. As this was

likely the last time she would show up here, it seemed prudent to shame her uncle as much as humanly possible.

As she followed the concierge down the familiar corridor to Mycroft's private rooms, Thea worked hard to ignore the fluttering of her stomach. It would not do to

get all excited about seeing them now. No, if she wanted to follow through with her plan there was no room for anything other than calculated calm, otherwise

they would catch her out and possibly sway her. That would simply not do at all.

Her father was lounging in an armchair by the window, her uncle was leaning against his desk, arms folded in an uncharacteristic display of defensiveness.

Thea nearly smiled at him. At least Mycroft seemed aware that recent events might have left his niece disgruntled; credit where credit was due.

"Gentlemen," Thea said smoothly as she closed the door behind her.

"Alethea," Mycroft replied, moving towards her, reconsidering and making for his chair behind the desk. "How have you been?"

"Well, thank you."

In the armchair, Sherlock began to slightly rub the tips of his left thumb and middle finger together. Thea kept her face relaxed and her breathing even. She

remained standing on the ancient, expensive carpet about three steps from the door, neither avoiding nor seeking eye contact with either man in the room.

"Please, do take a seat," Mycroft said after a few moments of uncomfortable silence.

Thea pulled the visitors chair from under the desk and wordlessly sat, spine straight, hands in her lap. She was pleased that she seemed to have them at a

disadvantage. Mycroft at least, Sherlock had in all likelihood realised last night in John's kitchen that Thea would not burst into the meeting to put on an

emotional display. Nonetheless, she could tell that he, too, was unnerved by her stillness.

She would not ask them why they had summoned her. She would not offer anything. This was going to be as awkward as it could possibly be and Thea would

revel in their discomfort.

"This is juvenile," Mycroft finally sighed when it became clear that Thea would not give an inch. "I'm aware you must be experiencing a number of conflicting and

complex emotions, it's only natural, I suppose…but it seems unreasonable to stall the process of understanding why these circumstances could simply not be

avoided."

Thea just looked at him, thinking of raw fennel and the whirr of printers and sleeping cats. She was acutely aware that her father was watching her closely,

scanning for any cracks in her perfectly calm façade. The urge to cross her arms, draw her legs up or even just slump a little was almost overwhelming but Thea

managed to remain perfectly still.

"You must have questions." Her uncle's eyes drilled into her, his defensiveness morphing into irritation rather swiftly.

Thea wanted to shrug but did not. It was too risky. A shrug could easily betray her desolation even if it was meant to come off as nonchalant.

"Alethea, I have been out of the country for months and some rather pressing matters demand my attention," Mycroft said, an undercurrent of exhaustion

softening his exasperation. "I haven't time for games."

Thea smiled.

"That's perfectly understandable," she said pleasantly. "I imagine your in-tray is the stuff of nightmares, Mr Holmes."

In his chair her father emitted a soft chuckle.

"I told you," he said, shooting his brother a glance. "It's actually a little bit clever."

Thea ignored him, although she was indecently pleased that he was already resorting to flattery, as miniscule as the compliment might have been.

"It's not clever, it is childish," Mycroft sighed. "You are reinventing petulance and it's not going to do anyone any favours. It will merely postpone a conversation

we are inevitably going to have, quite likely so we will be forced to have it at a much less convenient point in time."

"There really is no need for conversation," Thea said.

"I say we let this run its course," Sherlock told Mycroft. "We all know this little tantrum is going to pass within a week or two, it seems undignified to cajole

someone into permitting one to explain oneself."

"There is no need for explanation." Thea met her father's look head on without as much as a flinch.

"Oh really?" he asked, sarcasm dripping from every syllable.

"Indeed not," she said calmly. "But as you are both clearly under the impression that I require rationalisation, allow me to assuage your concerns, gentlemen."

It was rare that her father and uncle looked at her with unbridled interest, but both of them were doing so now. It was the kind of look she had craved for

most of her conscious life, the look that signified that they sincerely wanted know what she had to say and were not at all certain of what it was going to be.

"I have no doubt as to the logic of your actions," Thea went on. "In all likelihood the knowledge of Mr Holmes the younger's survival would have placed me in

danger, so denying me this information was a safety measure for my own good…"

She noted slight matching creases appearing between her senior relations' eyebrows.

"Furthermore, his return to London was by no means a given until very recently and he was in no position to remain in regular contact with me, so wasn't it a

mercy of sorts to simply let me grieve and move on if we would not see each other again anyhow?"

Her uncle swallowed. Her father was watching her with flickering eyes and a trace of rapt fascination.

"You did the very best you could under unfortunate circumstances, gentlemen," Thea said. "Your actions were informed by nothing but your best intentions for

my physical and mental well-being. I understand that, I never questioned it for a second. So, you see, it is truly unnecessary to have a longwinded

conversation about this. Unless of course I am mistaken in my assessment of the situation?"

Her uncle cleared his throat.

"You're quite correct in your…assessment," he rasped.

"I suspected so." Thea pushed back her chair and stood. "Well, this has been a pleasure. Mr Holmes," she walked up to Mycroft and held out her hand, "I trust

you have a few weeks' worth of rigorous business to attend to."

Her uncle stared at her hand as though it was some kind of dead animal and made no move to shake it. Thea's smile never wavered as she turned to Sherlock

and offered her hand to him.

"As for you, Mr Holmes," she said. "I have no doubt you have a myriad of homespun pleasure's to reacquaint yourself with, so I won't encroach on your time

any longer."

"Your hair is as bad as John's moustache," he said.

"I'll be sure to let him know." Thea managed to keep her smile even as Sherlock took her hand and shook it briefly and firmly. "Good morning, gentlemen."

"Good morning," Mycroft said automatically and Sherlock rolled his eyes.

Thea turned and walked from the room steadily, closing the door behind her without too much of a click and walked down the corridor pretending she was

stalking a deer through the woods – swift but unhurried, with quiet tread, perfectly focussed on the act of walking.


	9. Memory Lane Pt1

John shaved his moustache.

"And so it begins," Thea muttered into her teacup.

"Turns out Mary wasn't crazy about it." John was concentrating on buttering his toast.

"Mary wasn't crazy about it three months ago." Thea eyeballed him across the rim of her cup. "Why would it suddenly matter?"

"Because she's said so now, hasn't she."

"I bet she hasn't."

"Thea, I didn't shave for your father."

"And I bet you're not going round there tonight either."

"I-"

"It's fine, John." Thea put her cup down and stood. "I won't be home til late, anyway. We're going to admire some burning effigies and drink goon."

"Excuse me?"

"Remember, remember the fifth of November," Thea sang as she walked out of the kitchen. "The gunpowder treason and plot…"

()()()()()()()()

Not quite twelve hours later, her father dragged John from a pyre rather dramatically.

Three days later he did some weeping in an abandoned underground tunnel and – presto – things were back to business as far as John, Sherlock and Baker

Street were concerned.

Thea was unsurprised at this turn of events; still, she was fuming.

"You'd think he was the second coming or something," she hissed, shoving the paper at Lisa. They were sitting in their favourite coffee shop, five different

cakes on the table between them because Lisa was pre-menstrual and Thea was, well, fuming.

"It was a bit clever," Lisa said through a mouthful of ganache.

"Please," Thea rammed her fork into the carrot cake violently, "it was perfectly predictable. I mean, has no one ever seen _V for Vendetta_? They made a movie

about this very scenario and now the press are inflating his insufferable ego even further. He's even wearing the bloody hat again. It's John Lennon all over."

"John Lennon?"

"He abandoned his first son, did you know? And not one word of negative press about it. As if shirking parental responsibility is perfectly fine so long as you're

somewhat gifted in other fields."

"Tragic," Lisa deadpanned.

"Piss off."

A bag lady shuffled into the café and scanned the tables. Lisa started rooting through her pockets for spare change, Thea rested her head on the table,

admiring the layers of the black forest cake from up close.

"Smiles," the bag lady sang out, starting a slow journey from table to table. "Smiles for all."

It was the latest trend amongst the more harmless homeless folk to sell smiley stickers. It was a bit ironic and quite a bit genius. Thea enjoyed imagining the

smiley sticker factory, staffed by starving Cambodian orphans or some such, fuelling the free trade on the streets of London.

"I'll have a smile," Lisa said when the lady arrived at their table. "And one for my friend. She needs it badly."

"Piss off."

"Oh, I got a special one for her," the lady purred.

Thea groaned and closed her eyes.

"What-" she heard Lisa start but the lady had already wandered off and a moment later jingling bells announced her departure from the premises.

"Thea," Lisa said. "Something odd has happened."

Thea lifted her head. In front of Lisa lay one ordinary smiley sticker and one handmade sticker, the plain white kind people used to make name tags for

conventions and orientation days, sporting a detailed and rather nice drawing of a severed hand. Underneath it, in curly longhand, was written _Property of_

 _Alethea Holmes._

"Oh, for goodness sake." Thea let her head drop back to the table, missing the strawberry tart narrowly.

"What is that?" Lisa asked.

"Psychological warfare," Thea said darkly.

"What?"

"He wants to trigger fond memories." Thea sat up and took the sticker, turning it over in her hands. "That's not playing fair at all."

"Is that from your dad?" Lisa looked utterly confused. "How did the bag lady-"

"Homeless network," Thea sighed.

"Okay…so what's the fond memory?"

Thea was still staring at the sticker. She was fairly certain it was part of the original batch, it would have been lame to make a new one just to throw her off

her game.

"When I was in primary school I kept getting my stuff nicked," she said. "Pencil cases, notebooks, lunch boxes…"

"Why?" Lisa frowned.

"I wasn't popular."

"I can't imagine."

"Seriously, man, piss off." Thea smiled. "Anyway. It got so frequent he made me these stickers to put on my things, instead of name tags. He picked the

severed hand as a warning to thieves."

"What, because they used to chop their hands off?"

"Precisely."

"Somehow I don't see that deterring arsehole primary schoolers," Lisa pointed out.

"Correct." Thea couldn't fight the grin tugging on the corners of her mouth.

"So what was the point?"

"Hang on."

Thea very carefully peeled back the coating on the glue and affixed it to her empty coffee cup.

"So. The sticker is on, the dickhead robs me. But of course he or she has to take the sticker off now so he can either take it home or leave it somewhere

without it being returned to me."

"Yea?"

"Go on," Thea said and pushed the cup towards Lisa. "Peel it off."

Lisa took the cup and scratched off the sticker.

"And?" she asked.

"Wet your hands."

"Hey?"

"Wet. Your. Hands." Thea dunked her paper napkin into her water glass and threw it at Lisa. Lisa caught it and wiped her hands. Immediately, a bright red

stain appeared on her fingers, covering all areas which had been in contact with the glue.

"Oh, I see." Lisa wiped harder and the stain intensified. "Come on. How do I get it off?"

"Uhm, you don't."

"It's _permanent_?" Lisa shrieked.

"Not as such. It'll fade eventually."

"Define _eventually_."

"Couple of weeks," Thea mumbled.

"Oh, you complete and utter cow," Lisa growled. "That's pretty nifty though."

"Don't touch your face for at least ten minutes," said Thea. "It stains a bit."

"How come your fingers are fine?"

"Statistically people peel labels off starting from the top left corner, something about an inherent sense of symmetry, so that's where the dye is concentrated. I

put it on from the middle outwards. I suppose if we lived in Japan it'd have to be across the entire top…and on the right if we were writing Hebrew-"

"Yea, alright, I got it," Lisa interrupted. "Did it work?"

"Obviously, look at our respective-"

"No, you numpty. Did it deter the kids robbing you?"

"Yes. It also motivated them to throw my schoolbag on the roof of the gym hall, but on the whole it was a pretty successful scheme."

"It's no wonder you're odd." Lisa regarded her fingers with considerable dismay. "It's sweet though, that he kept one."

"He was probably saving it for this exact kind of situation knowing it would arise eventually," Thea said darkly. "And it's not sweet. We are not sweet people.

It's emotional manipulation, pure and simple, and it's not going to work either."

"Of course not," Lisa said quickly. Too quickly.

"It isn't."

"Sure."

"Absolutely not."

"Okay, Thea."

()()()()()()()()

John and Sherlock were up to their elbows in cold case files, searching for any fleeting reference to patchouli oil.

"What's Spawn hiding in the basement?" Sherlock asked without any warning at all.

"The drums," John said. "And some lab equipment."

"What's she experimenting on?"

"Here's a thought: why not ask her yourself?"

"Oh, smashing idea." Sherlock frowned, rifling through the papers at high speed. " _Nothing that would be of interest to you, Mr Holmes. Action, reaction, nothing of_

 _consequence._ "

"You can't really blame her for being ticked off," John pointed out.

"Quite true. I can, however, blame her for aiming to high. She'll never be able to keep up this level of aloofness, it's not in her nature. I'm a little impressed

she's maintained detached for this long, considering how…clingy, I suppose the technical term is, she used to be."

"Huh." John kept his eyes on the files and his tone disinterested. He was far too involved in this strange game of emotional chess as it was, he had no desire

to entangle himself any further.

"She didn't touch the ground for two months, four days and seven hours once," Sherlock continued. "From just after six months of age she simply refused to be

placed on the floor. It started without warning and then stopped for no apparent reason. She allowed me to put her down and started crawling almost

immediately. Baffling."

"Are you actually reminiscing?" John asked before he could stop himself. " _You?_ "

Sherlock made a scoffing noise, scrunched up another sheet of useless information and pitched it into the fire place.

"Has it occurred to you to speak to her?"

"Dull."

"Oh, I'm sure bombarding her with strange mementos is much more amusing," John said a little hotly. "Still, I think you're only succeeding in getting her more

annoyed, if that's even possible."

"It's hardly a bombardment."

"There are three unopened packages addressed to her in your writing stacking up next to the front door. What's in them, actually? Anything that can go off?"

"Unopened?"

"As far as I can tell." John did allow for the possibility that Thea had opened and resealed the packages or possibly had X-rayed them. "If there's ears in them

or something, tell me now before my front room starts to reek of decayed human flesh."

"Nothing of the sort. It's-"

"I don't want to know," John cut him off. "This is not my jurisdiction. You two sort it out, I'll be keeping well out of the way, thank you."

"What route does she usually take to school?"

"Ask your brother. He'll print you a map."

"Here it is!" Sherlock exclaimed, punching the air, his fist closed around a decade old witness statement, already storming out of the room.

()()()()()

Riding to school Thea tended to enter a strange sort of time warp. She'd cycled there and back so often, her brain immediately engaged autopilot; and while it

often took her an hour to reach Hampstead, it frequently felt as though no time had passed at all.

There was some vague awareness of her surroundings, some antennae primed to detect anything out of the ordinary, essential to prevent accidents. It was

this awareness that began to register flashes of colour on some of the drabber walls Thea passed, peripheral blurs of vivid reds, yellows, pinks and oranges

that had definitely not been there previously.

 _Must be a new graffiti artist in town…_

It wasn't until she was stopped at a traffic light she could absolutely not avoid, that Thea tuned her eyes into the world fully and noticed the image on the wall

of the corner shop to her left. It was a multi-coloured monster about the size of a sausage dog. It was spiked, spitting flames and had wheels instead of legs.

There was something childlike about the style, but it was clearly the work of an adult, and quite an accomplished illustrator.

Thea frowned and rode on.

Not three hundred yards later another splash of brightness, this time on a wall enclosing an ugly stairwell, brought her to a stop. A twisted caterpillar, its lumpy

body studded with rusty nails.

Five minutes later another monster – bright purple with seven legs and three rows of teeth – snarled at her from a telephone pole, painted just at the right

height to be at eyelevel with her.

There was no moment of recognising the monsters as the denizens of _Rotten Island_ – Thea had looked at William Steig's illustrations so often that the

association was immediate. The tale of an inhospitable island populated by vile, mean-spirited creatures who are driven mad by the blooming of flowers and

annihilate one another in the ensuing savage war only to end up as fertiliser for more flowers, had been both her and her father's favourite.

There was another monster painted on the road itself at the next big crossing, another next to the giant window of the record shop, yet another waving from

the top floor of a tenement building…they were everywhere and by the time Thea rolled up to her school gates she'd counted eighteen of them – not including

the one's she'd missed before she stopped at the lights.

Right next to the entrance someone had painted a little yellow flower.

()()()()()()()()

"That's so sweet," Lisa cooed over the phone.

Thea was folded up behind the bike sheds, rolling a cigarette, the mobile jammed between her ear and shoulder.

"If you say sweet once more, I'm electrifying your bass strings," she grunted.

"If a man did that for me I'd totally go out with him."

"Don't be disgusting!"

"What I mean," Thea could feel her friend rolling her eyes at her on the other end, "is that he's expending time, effort, possibly a bit of cash and a lot of

thought to get back into your good graces. It's swee-"

Thea hung up, lit her cigarette and groaned. Inside her castle a door flew open and before she could slam it shut she was curled up on a mattress, the sound

of some tinny techno album drifting up from the room below, a pathetic space heater growling away in the corner on electricity leached from the flat above.

Sherlock was balancing a half-empty teacup on his knee, his back propped against the wall, _Rotten Island_ in hand.

"It got so the worst thing one monster could do to another was to push him into a flower. It made them _hysterical_ with rage…"

"I thought hysterics was if you can't stop laughing," Thea interrupted.

Her father sighed.

"The English language is pockmarked with strange pitfalls," he said. "See, _hysteria_ -"

Thea slammed the door shut and took some deep steadying breaths. So he'd spent hours reading her books. So he'd not shied away from explaining

vocabulary. So they'd been holed up in a cosy room drinking tea while the building raged around them. That didn't mean he wasn't still a bastard. It didn't even

mean he'd not been a bastard then.

Maybe it was time for her to send him some reminders of her own. Two could play this game.

Easily.


	10. Memory Lane Pt2

When John walked into the living room of 221B at about ten on Tuesday morning, he found the detective sitting perfectly still at the unusually empty kitchen

table. His attention seemed to be focussed on the only object on the table top – a small piece of milk chocolate (or what appeared to be milk chocolate, one

never knew with Sherlock) on a white saucer.

"Morning," John said loudly, hoping against hope to jolt his friend out of his contemplation.

Sherlock, to his credit, gave a brief grunt of recognition and resumed his stare off with the lonely confection.

"Evidence?" John asked, moving into the kitchen and putting the kettle on. "Left overs from Moriarty's Mercury Madness? Cuppa?"

"It was here when I woke up," Sherlock said. "And I slept in the chair. Quite a feat."

"Window or door?" John asked.

"Door, I imagine," Sherlock murmured distractedly. "She was always better at picking locks than at scaling walls."

"Why would Thea leave you chocolate?" John put the tea down next to the saucer and pulled out a chair.

"Excellent question." Sherlock's face was ever so slightly creased with the effort of scanning his memory for chocolate references. "I'd be confident in what she

was getting at if it wasn't November."

"What on earth are you talking about?"

"Alethea's retaliating. I jogged her memory, now she wants me to recall something. The chocolate is my clue."

"What chocolate memories do you have that involve your daughter…God, that sounds odder out loud than it did in my head."

"One. She tried to trap the Easter bunny when she was four and nearly killed the woman who lived upstairs in the process. Two. After we read _Charlie and The_

 _Chocolate Factory_ , she became obsessed with having instant tomato soup mixed with drinking chocolate, absolutely disgusting but she adored it. Three. If she

impressed Mycroft on their instructional outings he'd buy her ridiculously expensive chocolates and she would sit on the sofa, eating them one by one, gloating

at me. That's it. None of it seems particularly pertinent…unless she's warning me that she's obstructed the stairwell with cling film, which seems unlikely seeing

as you have made it up here without issue."

"Right." John sipped his tea and regarded the chocolate. "It's strangely sweet that you remember these things."

" _Sweet?_ " Sherlock's tone would have been more suited to pronounce _gonorrhoea_ or _pustule_. "What kind of a heartless clot do you take me for, calling it strange

that I have memories of my only child?"

"I just meant…considering that you only put things on the hard drive that are _really_ important – and I quote directly – it's-"

"Alethea is important," Sherlock blurted and looked suddenly almost bashful. "She's a source of a great many good recollections."

John look at the chocolate, brow creased.

"Have there been any _unpleasant_ incidents involving chocolate?" he asked slowly.

Sherlock cocked his head.

"Because, see," John said, "you've been trying to get her to remember the good things to soften her up. Maybe she wants to remind you of the very opposite."

"To prove her point." Sherlock looked at John with genuine amazement. "Of course. It's so obvious. Why didn't I think of that?"

"'Cause you're a twat," John offered.

Sherlock didn't appear to hear.

"Nothing," he announced after a while.

"Nothing?"

"Nope."

"Any chance you deleted it?"

"Fair chance," Sherlock admitted.

"Maybe you best eat it."

"Why?"

"Because perhaps the taste will remind you," John said. "Sensory memories are quite a powerful thing if pop-psychology be believed. Might be a particular kind

of chocolate."

Sherlock popped the piece into his mouth without hesitation and chewed slowly.

"Ah," he said flatly, flew out of his seat and across to the sink, where he proceeded to spew like it was the end of days.

John started in alarm and then watched with disgusted fascination as Sherlock heaved and hurled his guts up for what seemed minutes.

"Then again," he said when the detective was apparently finished, his forehead rested on the edge of the basin, panting slightly, "perhaps she's just

unleashing her own special brand of revenge."

"No," Sherlock said thickly. "I remember now. There may have been one slightly uncouth use of chocolate."

John raised his eyebrows.

"It was an emergency," Sherlock said, clearly anticipating his friend's judgement. "The landlord was practically beating the door down, Mycroft had frozen my

accounts in a pathetic attempt at intervention, I had just gone to sleep for the first time in days…I'm surprised she'd hold it against me. Frankly, I'm surprised

she still remembers."

"Holds what against you exactly?" John asked with a good deal of apprehension.

"John, you, of all bleeding hearts, must understand that no decent human being would dare begin a conversation about something as trite as rental arrears

when faced with a young father racing for the hospital with his distressingly unwell child."

For a moment John just looked at him.

"You," he said finally, "are awful."

"Please," Sherlock scoffed, reminding John so much of Thea it was nigh absurd. "Alethea was perfectly alright by the time we got down the street. I seem to

recall she ate her own weight in chips not half an hour later."

"You poisoned your daughter to get out of being evicted?"

"He was hardly going to evict us, but it did spare me a tedious conversation. And I didn't _poison_ her, don't be so dramatic."

"How old was she?"

"Why would that matter?" Sherlock met John's glare and seemed taken aback. "Five. Nearly six."

" _Sherlock_!"

"What? Is your moral outrage exponential to her youth? That seems rather hypocritical."

"Children get special dispensation," John shouted.

"Why?" Sherlock shouted back. "Why is everyone so insistent that the common toddler should be treasured more than the average teenager or twenty-

year-old or middle aged person? What happened to 'a person's a person, no matter how small'?"

"Are you quoting Dr Seuss at me?"

"Are you suggesting you're sensibilities would be less offended if I'd fed Alethea the corpus delicti three years later?"

"You're missing the point," John growled, ready to tear his – or, better, Sherlock's- hair out in exasperation.

"No, you are being superior. And possibly ageist."

"Are you aware of how ironic it is that you, an alleged genius, require an explanation for practically every single view the rest of the human race takes on

almost every situation?"

"The human race is largely composed of imbeciles."

They faced off across the table now, the empty saucer between them. Sherlock's phone buzzed.

"There's a disembowelled man waiting for us at Bart's," he said after scanning the message. "You'll be pleased to hear he's in his mid to late thirties."

"Twat," John muttered as he followed Sherlock's billowing coat tails towards the stairwell.

()()()()()

On Friday an elevator carrying John and Sherlock towards the bowels of an underground car park, groaned, shuddered ominously and stopped.

"I told you we should have taken the stairs," John said drily. "This whole building is dodgy. Press the call button."

Sherlock heaved a sigh.

"There's a call button, isn't there?" John craned his neck to look past Sherlock to the row of buttons on the wall. "There. The one with the little telephone on."

Sherlock pressed the button. Nothing happened.

"Try again," John demanded.

"We're losing time, John."

"Yea, sorry about that. Let me just get out my magical elevator fixing kit-"

"Oh, for goodness sake," Sherlock spat.

"You-"

"Not your attempt at humour," Sherlock cut him off. "The music. Listen."

The elevator might have ceased motion but the soothing muzac buzzing from the ceiling was still doodling away. It was something classical, not _For Elise_ or

anything else John might have identified by name, but something piano-y and violin-y at any rate. To the doctor it sounded like perfectly ordinary elevator

music. Perhaps just a smidgen nicer than what they played in the elevators at the hospital. A tad speedier maybe. A littler sweeter, too.

"Resourceful little viper," Sherlock muttered.

"What?"

Sherlock mashed his fingertip on the call button once more.

"Alethea, kindly restrict your ludicrous campaign of misconstruction to times when I'm not in the middle of work," he barked at the intercom, only to be met with

silence.

"Are you high?" John asked.

Sherlock rolled his eyes.

"How on earth could Thea possibly be responsible for this?" John searched Sherlock's pupils for irregularities, his hands for tremors, his brow for sweat. "Quite

apart from the fact that she's – hopefully – at school right now, how would she know we were in this exact elevator at this exact time? And even if she was

stalking you, which she's not, I can assure you, how would she have stopped it? You're being paranoid."

"She is practically rubbing my face in it," Sherlock sighed. "Listen."

"What are you on about?" The music, admittedly, seemed to have gotten a little louder, the quality of sound a little better…John's heart sank a little.

"Ligeti's violin concerto. Obviously." Sherlock leaned with his back against the wall.

John massaged the bridge of his nose.

"Enlighten me," he said.

"Well," Sherlock cleared his throat. "When Alethea first became disillusioned with the education system and decided school was a waste of her time, I offered

her a deal."

John sighed and waited.

"I told her if she learned to play Ligeti's violin concerto, she'd never have to go to school again."

"Why?"

"Because it steered the conversation away from never ending cyclical nagging and whining." Sherlock smiled ruefully. "She could be unbelievably relentless

even when she was quite young."

"Seems a risky deal," John said. "What if she'd learned it?"

"Impossible," Sherlock said simply. "It's an absurdly – and I mean _absurdly_ – complex piece of music. I might as well have told her she could quite school if only she learned to fly by flapping her arms. The risk was virtually nil. Plus, if she _had_ turned out to be

an exceptionally gifted violinist, the kind of violinist who can learn such a piece before they even age into double figures, I could have taken her out of school

with a clean conscience. Her future as a concert violinist would have been assured."

"You know, I can't quite make up my mind whether you're genius at parenting or absolutely crap." John was shaking his head.

"In this particular instance, I fear the latter might be more appropriate."

"Why?" John asked.

"I underestimated her stamina and tenacity when it came to practise," Sherlock said quietly. "The possibility of escaping school overrode all sense of

self-preservation, well, what little of that one has at the age of eight. She practised the piece until she got acute tendonitis. It was a pretty ugly business.

Doctors barred her from the instrument for months-"

"How much does one have to play the violin to develop tendonitis?"

"Hours," Sherlock said. "Hours and hours every day."

"Why didn't you put a stop to it?"

"Ah." Sherlock became rather interested in the elevator's dirty linoleum floor. "It may have escaped my attention. People in useful positions were just starting

to take me seriously. I got busy and a little distracted."

John opted not to reply to this but could not suppress and rather judgemental grunt.

"I'm not solely to blame here," Sherlock said huffily. "You've lived with Alethea for the last two years – _technically_ the last four years, actually – you know

perfectly well how capable she is of developing obsessions and how difficult it is to dissuade her."

"True," John admitted. "Only of course in the example at hand, you were the one to suggest the obsession and did not actually attempt to dissuade her."

"Yes, yes…" Sherlock rolled his shoulders and pressed the call button again. "I allow that this was not one of my most glorious moments, Alethea, but in the

grand scheme of things it was only a couple of months in a fancy glove. You didn't lose an arm."

The music got a little louder still. The elevator remained motionless.

"Are you sure that was all?" John asked, raising his voice a little to be heard over a mindboggling vibrato.

"What do you mean?" Sherlock shouted.

"Did she _just_ end up with tendonitis or was there more? Maybe she wants you to remember it all before she lets us move on." John pressed the call button

now. "Turn that down," he barked. "It's driving me up the wall and I've got nothing to do with this. I'm an innocent bystander, Thea, just turn it down a notch."

The music became slightly more muted and Sherlock sneered at the intercom with real hurt in his eyes.

"I'm pleased to see the two of you have such excellent rapport," he snapped.

"Shut up and recall," John snapped back.

He leaned back against the wall and watched Sherlock's face slacken ever so slightly, his eyes glazed over and flickering unsteadily, all sure fire signs he was

off into the palace, oblivious to the outside world. John couldn't help but wonder how often Thea had been faced with this exact expression throughout her

childhood and how long it had taken her to work out that it meant her needs would not be met until further notice. Probably not long, considering how

self-sufficient Thea had been even at ten, when John had first met her. Then again, perhaps she was still fighting against it, trying to break through the shell,

because – as Sherlock had pointed out – Thea was nothing if not persistent. Sherlock's snapping out of his scanning process in turn snapped John out of his

ponderings – the detective pressed the call button once more.

"You can't hold me responsible for all aftereffects of your own demented actions," he said. "Actually, you should probably thank me for helping you eradicate

them."

The music ratcheted up immediately, enough for John's hands to fly to his ears.

"Come on!" he shouted.

"I haven't got time for this!" Sherlock roared into the intercom.

The music turned nothing short of deafening.

"This is ludicrous!" Sherlock smacked his hand on the wall next to the call button. "It's ancient history and no apology of mine – even if I meant it – will have an

impact on anything."

The walls were no vibrating with crescendo.

"No one in their right mind would expect an apology from you," John yelled. "Just tell me what happened!"

"What – like a confessional?" Sherlock spat, barely audible over the violin.

"That's what you get for sending her to Catholic school, I suppose," John said wryly, unsure Sherlock would even hear him.

"Fine!" Sherlock's mouth was practically touching the intercom now. "Could you alter the conditions so John can receive my shocking confession, you utter

drama queen!"

The music stopped so suddenly both men flinched.

"Go on," John said, completely intrigued against his will.

Sherlock rubbed his hand over his face and shook his head.

"As it tends to happen when one focusses all one's mental energy on a single task, that task – when taken away – will leave certain imprints on the mind. It

can be unpleasant. It _was_ unpleasant. But we took care of it, eventually."

"What on earth are you on about?" John looked at his friend with complete incomprehension.

Sherlock sighed.

"When Alethea stopped practising the Ligeti piece, she experienced something akin to the symptoms of cold turkey. She became very moody. She didn't sleep

well. She would hear the piece in her head over and over like some kind of highly evolved tinnitus; that was what was keeping her awake. That and…uhm…the

twitching."

"The twitching," John repeated lamely.

"In the fingers of her left hand and or right wrist," Sherlock said. "She had become so accustomed to repeating the same motions her hands were seemingly

unable to cease, even when deprived of the instrument."

"That sounds bloody awful."

"It was inconvenient. She kept dropping things. Writing was impossible once the right hand got going. There was some rather intense cramping. Her head

would jerk towards the left as if to hold the violin in place and become locked in that position."

"Fucking hell."

"It was suggested," Sherlock went on, apparently on a roll now, "that Alethea might take some time of school until she was recovered. But that of course

would have been counterproductive to my strategy, so I insisted she went. There were some unfortunate incidents of particularly ghastly children dubbing her

a spastic and so on, on account of her…well, spasms…so they weren't necessarily incorrect. In true form Alethea retaliated by attacking the mocking parties

physically and ended up getting expelled from that particular school."

John stared. The elevator groaned back into action. They rode to the bottom most level in silence.

"However," Sherlock said as soon as they exited the sliding doors, "it turned out to be an invaluable teaching opportunity in terms of controlling one's impulses.

It took some time, naturally, but Alethea learned to suppress her ticks and getting rid of the never-ending Ligeti loop was the first deletion she accomplished.

Quite the achievement, really. It had really dug its teeth in, so to speak."

"Marvellous," John muttered.

"So?" Sherlock stared at John intensely. "Is her ploy coming to fruition? Are you beginning to view me as a callous, child-mistreating monstrosity yet?"

"Well," John said, rubbing the back of his neck, "yes."

Sherlock's face fell a little.

"But that's not a recent development," John continues with the faintest hint of a smirk. "I think it might have started when you sent your ten-year-old out for

take-away at midnight on the day I moved in."

"Barely two-hundred yards away," Sherlock murmured, his face a perfect mask of composure yet again.


	11. Ambushes

He got her a good one the following Tuesday afternoon. Thea, drenched from her ride home, padded into the kitchen through the back door in order to save

the carpet from her dripping clothes, flared her nostrils at the irregular scent in the kitchen and was almost knocked off balance by the images shooting up from

her subconscious like a geyser of sentimentality.

 _Sherlock and her, rolled up in separate corners of his bed like cats, stacks of books and biscuits between them…  
_

 _Watching a black and white movie with Klaus Kinsky in it in the middle of the night after she'd had a nightmare – a film far more terrifying than her dream, really, but_

 _not even remotely scary because of Sherlock's proximity…  
_

 _Sitting in her grandparent's attic, wrapped into one of her father's jumpers, staring out of the window, waiting, waiting, waiting…  
_

 _Sherlock on the couch, sitting perfectly still as he thought, oblivious to Thea stacking empty take away cups on his head…  
_

 _"If it starts to smoulder, you call me. Understood?"…  
_

 _"How does water work?" "What on earth do you mean?" "Why is it liquid?" Sherlock grinning at her "I thought you'd never ask."…  
_

 _Sherlock and her playing tic-tac-toe in permanent marker on Mycroft's cream coloured sofa…_

 _Falling asleep under the kitchen table to the sound of beakers clinking above…  
_

 _Sherlock sitting in the open window of their seventh floor flat, feet dangling outside, while she clawed at the door frame pretending not to be scared for him…  
_

 _"Am I going to hell?" "Absolutely no need to worry, Spawn." "Why?" "Do you know what 'religious fanaticism' means?"…  
_

 _The back of a cab, rain running down the windows, her father's face illuminated by his mobile…_

"What the bloody hell is that stench?"

Thea's head snapped up and there was Mary, standing in the door frame, also drenched, wrinkling her nose. _  
_

Thea walked on wobbly legs to the window and wrenched it open, allowing the smell of Port Royal tobacco to drift from the room. She realised she was smiling.

Bother.

Knowing that Mary would absolutely murder Sherlock for smoking in their kitchen was a miniscule comfort. It had been barely a month since her father showed

up at the Doom Tomb and already Thea could feel herself softening dangerously.

()

"Tetanus is no joke, you know."

Thea closed her eyes and wondered if her father had actually managed to build a functional teleporter. He had appeared by her side soundlessly – admittedly,

there was quite a bit of street noise and Thea had been totally absorbed in her task, but still.

She took a few deep breath, opened her eyes and resumed scraping almost golden flakes of rust off the abandoned bicycle frame into a glass jar.

"I'm immunised," she said.

"Are you sure you're up to date?"

"I should hope so, considering my guardian is a doctor."

"Technically he's not actually your guardian anymore."

Thea wiped the fish knife she used for easy scraping on her pants and stood.

"Good day, Mr Holmes."

She supposed it was true. It wasn't like Sherlock had come back secretly. Quite the opposite. He'd smashed back into London and the internet with a big

splash, having the online loonies going absolutely apeshit. In principal he was the one back in charge when it came to Thea, but she didn't think he would

actually assert his authority. It wasn't like he could forcibly move her back to Baker Street and imprison her there. So all Thea had to do now was dig in her

heels and stay put with John and Mary until Sherlock stopped pestering her.

"You've been scraping rust all over town. Why?" he asked her turned back.

"I'm sure you have more interesting business to attend to."

Thea zipped her bag shut and made to unlock her bike from a lamppost.

"I _am_ interested in your doings."

"Mr Holmes," Thea said wearily and turned around, meeting his intense stare with tired eyes of her own, "if you were truly interested you would have deduced

most of my activities by now. I'm not asking you to," she added quickly. "By all means, I would prefer it if you stayed away entirely, but if you insist on

ambushing me at random please don't add insult to intrusion by claiming you're interested in anything I do."

Sherlock opened his mouth.

"Beyond," Thea jumped in, realising she'd left herself wide open for retort, "beyond things which you would do also and things you believe I'm prone to do

because of our shared genes. I'm not yours to observe anymore."

"You've missed me," her father said simply.

"Irrelevant."

"How?"

"Because we're programmed to miss the dead. It takes a remarkably unfeeling creature to not notice absence. I'd have missed you if I was a dog, too. It

makes no difference."

"A dog would be pleased to see me."

"I am not _not_ pleased." Thea held his gaze, feeling as though her feet were about to ignite. "That has no bearing on anything though."

"That seems odd."

"It's not odd." Thea was curling her toes inside her shoes in an effort to keep her hands from clenching. "In fact the situation is playing out just like you and

your brother predicted. Unsurprisingly."

"Meaning?"

"I grieved, I moved on," Thea said.

Her father's face didn't fall as such. It derailed for a second, then reassembled.

"I've got work to do," Thea said with finality. "As I'm sure you do. Have a pleasant afternoon. Mr Holmes."

She swung her leg over the bike and was off before Sherlock had a chance to say anything. Tears were streaming down her face before she'd even rounded

the first corner.

()

Sherlock burst into John's consultation room without knocking.

"I'm at work, Sherlock," John said without looking up from the patient file on his desk.

"I am distraught," Sherlock announced.

"Excuse me?" John's head snapped up and his hands folded on top of the paperwork in one smooth motion.

"I have taken a generous amount of time to analyse," Sherlock flopped into the chair opposite. "I even considered that I might be hungry or experiencing mild

PTSD. As unlikely as it seems, John, I appear to be distraught."

"Alright." John cleared his throat. "What is distressing you?"

"Have you got any idea how often I was locked into some inane battle about Alethea putting on her shoes or staying away from dangerous chemicals or

relinquishing her grip on some item I required, telling myself 'this too shall pass'?"

John frowned.

"It's not reasonable that I should have seen her through teething and chickenpox and the horrors of primary school, played endless hours of horrendously

boring games with her, spent _years_ far to intimately acquainted with her bodily excretions, only to be denied access when she is actually beginning to be

interesting. It is unfair. Distressingly so."

"Are you saying it upsets you that she won't talk to you?"

"She _is_ talking to me," Sherlock groaned. "I mean, she is addressing words to me, but she is not _saying_ anything."

"You've got to give her time," John said cautiously. "You kind of dumped a real humdinger on her."

"I have given her time." Sherlock dropped his head to the desk with a thunk. "She has never held a grudge for this long. I fear-"

"You _fear_?"

"Yes, John. I fear. I fear she has made up her mind to be unrelenting."

For quite some time they said nothing. John was unsure how to proceed. It seemed unwise to assure Sherlock that Thea would come around, mainly because

John was uncertain that she would. Sure, it would have been incredibly drastic of her to stick to her guns, but it was by no means out of the question. The

Holmes, time had taught him, were nothing if not stubborn. And perhaps a fraction self-righteous.

"What is she doing?" Sherlock asked finally, a distinct note of desperation in his tone.

"In terms of what?" John asked.

"Does she have any plans?" Sherlock glanced up at John through his dishevelled hair miserably. "In terms of the future? Have you chosen a university?"

"She's a month shy of fifteen, Sherlock."

"We both know her schooling isn't in any way challenging for her."

"No, we've not chosen a university. And I very much doubt I'll have much input when the time comes to consider these things." John sighed. "She's got her

band. She enjoys that. And, uhm, she's good at finding projects to occupy her."

"What's with the rust?"

"Rust?" John said weakly. "I really…Sherlock. I'm not comfortable filling you in on Thea's private enterprises."

"Interesting choice of word."

"Sherlock. This is not my business."

"I have entrusted you with the care of my child. It is your business." Sherlock glared at him.

"And it's been a privilege," John met his glare unflinchingly. "However, that's exactly why I'm not getting into this with you."

"Your principles are inconvenient. Admirable, I suppose. But inconvenient to the core."

"May I suggest you admit your distress to your daughter?"

"What good could possibly come of that?"

"I don't know," John said honestly.

()

Thea was reclined on her work bench, headphones on, UV lamp aimed at the left side of her stomach when a slight clunk penetrated the sounds of _The Pixies_.

She craned her head awkwardly just in time to see a container of witchhazel finish its noisy descent down the basement stairs. The basement door didn't have

a lock. There was no need. Neither John nor Mary ever came down here. They would frequently appear in her room upstairs but the basement, by unspoken

agreement, was Thea's secret sanctuary.

Frowning she made to sit up, pulling her headphones off, but before she'd even swung her legs off the table, Sherlock was standing at the bottom of the

stairs.

"Good eve-" he stopped abruptly and simply stared at her exposed midriff.

"I…" Thea frantically looked around for her T-shirt, only to spot it miles away on the drum stool. She thought about covering her stomach with her hands but it

was so obviously futile that she didn't end up bothering. At least she was wearing a bra.

"My god," Sherlock said. "What…oh…I see."

"Yea. Well."

"When John said you had found a project I imagined a great many things." Her father came closer very slowly, as though approaching a wild animal. "This was

not one of them."

"That must be a relatively new experience, Mr Holmes," Thea said as haughtily as it was possible, considering she was sitting on a table in her bra and jeans,

her face burning with mortification…and perhaps a little outrage. Sherlock was completely oblivious to her face and tone. His entire focus was taken up by his

daughter's midsection which was covered in an enormous tattoo.

"Is that the periodic table?" he asked, still a few metres away, squinting in the relative dark of the room. The UV lamp was the only source of light in the

basement at present.

"No, it's not the bloody periodic table," Thea snapped.

"What is it then?" Sherlock snapped back, then caught himself. "I mean, may I see? Up close?"

Thea finally got off the table and moved to the wall to turn on the light proper. She stared up at the bulb as Sherlock came closer and closer and crouched

down, until his nose was almost touching her belly button.

"Did you do this?" he asked finally.

"Yes." Thea closed her eyes and waited for him to blow is top.

"How?"

"With considerable difficulty," she admitted. "And lots of mirrors."

"How did you procure the equipment?"

"It's laughably easy to build a tattoo gun."

"Why?"

"Because all one really needs is a small motor, a pen and a guitar string."

"No. Why did you do _this_?"

Thea's stomach was covered in rows of squares. The left, where she had started over a year ago, was a little shaky, but the grid grew progressively neater as

her hand had steadied and she'd become accustomed to the pain. The squares were coloured with varying shades of brown and had small numbers in the top

right corners. From afar and in bad lighting, she supposed, it was easy to mistake her work for the periodic table.

"Product testing," Thea said quietly.

Sherlock stood and Thea, despite herself, looked up at him, still somewhat bracing herself for an eruption. Sherlock let his gaze wander across the basement.

She saw him take in the equipment on the shelves, the containers of rust scrapings, the terrariums full of condensation and metal parts in varying states of

oxidisation, the colour chart on the wall, the bottles of solutions, the small parcels of finished pigment.

"You didn't just do the tattoo yourself. You actually made the colours."

It wasn't a question.

"Yes."

"That's what the rust is for. Iron oxide. Brown tones."

Thea could feel the hedgehog trying to force its way up her throat. She tried to swallow it down but it wouldn't budge.

"Yes," she rasped.

"Brown tones."

Her father looked at her and something she'd not ever seen before bled into his eyes.

Thea closed her own and waited. She knew, almost certainly, that he knew. Above all things what she had missed most when he'd been gone, was the feeling

that there was a person in the world who shared her history. A person who would look at things and think what she was thinking. Someone who would look at

what appeared to be nothing more than shades of brown and know it was something else entirely. Of course, she'd told herself, this was perhaps delusional.

It was what she wanted to think but that didn't make it true. Perhaps Sherlock had been so absorbed in his own world that it had never fully merged with her

own. Perhaps it had been childish – naturally, since she'd been a child – to feel as though he saw the same things. It had been strangely comforting in the

months of bone crushing grieve to think that maybe she'd been alone all along, only too young and stupid to realise it.

"The shades of all the bears."

Thea exhaled slowly and opened her eyes.

"Yes," she said, watching in rapt fascination as a single tear slid down her father's pale cheek. "The shades of all the bears."


	12. The Shades of all the Bears

_2005, Underground, London_

The tube was sardine-can-chockers. Thea was squished between the wall and Sherlock, surrounded by a wall of legs and bags. Above her people were eating,

talking on the phone, talking to each other, listening to music, staring out the window, emanating scents and sighs. The inside of her head felt like a train

station with thoughts pulling in and out before she could grab hold of them, bumping into each other and shouting angrily, squeezing past each other with

aggravating friction. She felt headachy and sick and had been on the stupid underground for hours and hours because her father needed a place to sit and

think. Closing her eyes was useless because she could still hear and smell. It was impossible to cover up all of her receptacles at once; even when she took off

her jacket and wrapped it around her head, blindly trying to tie the sleeves into a knot, things were still getting through. And it made breathing hard as well.

Desperate for distraction, she slid forward until her feet reached the panel under the seat and started drumming her heels against it furiously. Because

humming was to quiet, she let out long, steady squeals, covering her ears and screwing her eyes shut, trying to breathe through her nose rather than her

mouth.

She felt someone touch her shoulder, opened her eyes a fraction and was face with a woman who had a face painted over her actual face and did not like

people very much, including herself. Thea shrieked, pushed her hand off her shoulder, closed her eyes even tighter and upped both her kicking speed and the

volume of her squeals.

"Is she with you? Sir? Hello? _Sir?_ " she could hear the woman faintly.

"What?" asked her father's drowsy voice.

"There's something wrong with your-"

"Wha- oh."

"She's-"

"Go away. Thanks." Thea felt Sherlock shift off the seat and squash himself onto the floor in front of her, much to the dismay of the wall of people.

"Look at me," he ordered.

"Too many things," she moaned, keeping her eyes shut, ears covered and legs swinging.

"I know." His hands grabbed hold of her ankles and planted them firmly on the ground. "Look at me."

"No!"

He sighed.

"I'll show you a magic trick if you do."

Very reluctantly, Thea opened her eyes. Sherlock smiled at her. He didn't seem scared by all the people and things everywhere at all. He motioned for her to

take her hands off her ears.

"Look at all those shoes," he said, indicating the mass of feet behind him. "Loads of shoes but – ladies and gentlemen – when I snap my fingers there will be

no more shoes, only bears!"

He snapped his fingers.

"They're still shoes," Thea sniffed.

"I supposed that's true," her father admitted. "But the trick will work better if you pretend they're bears. Small, flat, leathery bears without faces."

She cocked her head at him.

"Can you see the bears, Alethea?"

She nodded.

"They're all in a jumble," Sherlock said in horror. "They're meant to go into the big top to dance in just a minute and they're not at all lined up. If the circus

director catches them like this, there'll be hell to pay, you know it will. You've got to get them in line – and fast!"

"What order?" Thea was eyeing the shoe-bears with interest.

"You mean you don't know?" her father said incredulously. "Dancing bears are always lined up by colour."

"But these are all just brown and black…"

"Don't be silly, Alethea. Nothing's ever just anything." He pointed to the pair of shoes right in front of them. "That bear is not brown, that's tan. And that one,"

he pointed to the next, "that's not brown either, it's Fallow. Which one goes first?"

Thea's eyes widened and she could feel the tube's chaos recede into the background.

"Do the light ones go in first or the dark ones?" she asked, licking her lips.

"Excellent question," Sherlock sat back up next to her and leaned forward to get a better view of the bears. "You decide."

"Dark one's first," she said firmly.

"So therefore…"

"The Fallow bear, than the tan," Thea scanned the floor. "But the Chestnut one goes in front of both…"

"Precisely." Sherlock leaned back and interlaced his fingers, ready to resume his mental wandering. "When you're done lining up the bears make sure their hats

match their shade." He nodded towards the trousered legs before her.

Coffee, chocolate, sepia, tawny…Thea took a deep breath and made the bears dance.


	13. Cups of Tea

**Hello, my freaky darlings. I'm going on holidays - so there'll be nothing for a couple of months. Let me know if you're still into it :) Here's a nice long one to tie you over. X**

"I'll put the kettle on," Thea said as their joint memory faded from the basement.

"Mary's due home in five minutes," Sherlock pointed out. "And I don't much fancy her cooing over us having what she'd bound to term a moment."

"We're not having a moment," Thea said firmly. "And I've got a kettle down here. Boiling water is a timeless ingredient."

She tugged her shirt of the drum stool and put it back on. The kettle, cups and tea things were set up on an old fashioned serving trolley in the corner nearest

the power points. Thea could hear her father move around the basement behind her as she went through tea making motions. She could nearly feel a pull –

like a maelstrom – as he greedily absorbed all information the basement's contents and set up offered.

"Here you are."

"How many times did you break in at Baker Street?" Sherlock looked at a very familiar cup bearing an absurdly magnified image of a tea leaf. Well, only a

segment thereof, really, the whole leaf wouldn't have fit.

"Twice…no, three times." Thea settled down at her work table. "Most recently to bring you chocolate."

Her father grimaced slightly, took another sweeping look across the basement and finally pulled out the second chair to sit opposite Thea.

"Your work space is very well organised."

"Thank you."

Suddenly there seemed to be very little to talk about. Thea was aware that Sherlock, simply by being in this room, was now in the picture about a great many

things. The pigments and tattooing supplies aside, he was bound to have noticed the rolling pouch on the windowsill, the chopping bowl on the floor below the

shelf, the folder of his own compositions on the music stand, the plastic dinosaurs glued on the wall…

"Product testing," Sherlock interrupted her meandering.

"Pardon?"

"You said you were product testing." Her father sipped his tea and eyed her over the rim of the cup. "That suggests this is not simply a sentimental project,

thankfully."

Twenty minutes earlier, Thea would have either shown him the door or left the room herself if he refused to go. It was remarkable how small portions of time

could alter situations so drastically.

"I'm turning my transport into my showroom."

"To exhibit how your shades translate to the skin. Interesting. Why the tanning lamp?"

For a moment Thea wondered if it would be wiser to abort this conversation now. It probably was. That said, the great pride she took in her work made it

impossible to rebuff questions about it.

"Right." Thea stood and pulled up her shirt, revealing the grid of browns once again. "It's matching sets on the left and the right. Twelve tones of brown on

either side." Sherlock nodded. "The left is the original set, the right is the control set to see how the colours hold up under UV exposure."

"Because?"

"Sun damage is a big thing. Colours fade and bleed and bleach, but with brown tones you've got to be especially careful because they can become virtually

invisible if they're not good enough."

"That's…thorough."

Thea looked up at her father, wondering if she had imagined a note of appreciation in his tone.

"Your colours are rather nice," he ventured carefully. "Do they seem pleasantly nuanced and rich to me because I'm a layman?"

"No," Thea said. "They're really, really nice."

"That's fortunate." Sherlock leaned back and retrieved his cup. "You'd have been stuck with a foul looking midsection otherwise."

"Nothing fortunate about it." Thea lowered her shirt and sat back down. "I disfigured whole sacks of pigs' feet with the early prototypes. What you see on me

is refined, finished product."

"Oh, excuse me…" her father rolled his eyes and something deep inside Thea tightened and sang like an overstretched violin string.

"Don't be sarcastic," she said haughtily. "I'll have you know the product is fairly flying off the shelf."

"You don't mean to tell me you've sold any inks?"

"Ink and pigment, both."

"For money?"

"No, seashells and chickens."

"Now, who's sarcastic?" Sherlock was sporting one of his rare looks of surprise. "But that's rather good."

"It's marvellous, actually." Thea drained her tea. "It's going to tie me over nicely until…"

"Until what?" her father asked suspiciously.

"Well…uhm…until I start working, I suppose." Thea groaned inwardly. It was pathetic. One roll of his eyes, one little bonding experience and one cup of tea and

all caution had been scattered and now here she was.

"Working?" Sherlock echoed. "John said you're not even thinking of higher education yet. Shows how much he knows."

"Actually," Thea said slowly, "higher education is not currently part of the plan."

"Excuse me?"

"I said-"

"I heard," her father interrupted. "However, I fail to see how you will progress from secondary school into the working world without at least a brief

intermission at a tertiary institution."

"I'm not surprised," Thea muttered.

"What's the grand plan then, Alethea?" His tone got her dander right up.

"You don't get to waltz in here after playing possum for the better part of two years and grill me over my choices."

"I didn't 'play possum'. And you have not revealed any of your so-called choices, which is precisely why I am inquiring."

"You're not inquiring, you're judging."

"How could I possibly judge if I don't know what you're planning on doing?"

"Because you're an elitist posh boy."

"I'm beginning to worry you've chosen a career path in Woolworths middle management."

"And what if I did?"

"Aside from the fact that the pay is awful and the uniforms ghastly, you'd be dead from boredom within a month."

"Just because you're bored by anything that doesn't involve jumping off a high building, doesn't mean I have to-"

"Stars above, are you seriously telling me you want to become some kind of clerk?"

"I'm not telling you anything."

"If you were intent on keeping up your wall of silence, we'd not be in this room together. Here I am, expressing genuine interest in your doings and you're

being petulant because I dare voice the opinion that a vastly clever individual like yourself should bother obtaining a degree of some sort."

"You said university was dull."

"Well, as you keep telling me, I'm easily bored."

"I don't have to explain myself to you."

"You're not explaining anything. But you're reluctance to do so suggests that you know fully well that whatever it is you plan to do is perfectly asinine."

"There's nothing asinine about doing an apprenticeship."

"An apprenticeship to whom?"

"Mr Samson."

"This is like pulling teeth," Sherlock groaned. "You've assured me my opinions don't matter a jot when it comes to your life, so why on earth the rigmarole?"

This was an infuriatingly fair point.

"Mr Samson runs a very respectable tattoo parlour," Thea said. "I'm starting in six months, when the school year in finished."

Sherlock blinked. Once. Twice. Three times.

"And you're quite correct," Thea went on a little too defensively for her own liking, "you're opinion doesn't matter a jot."

"You mean to tell me you want to become a tattooist?"

"The preferred term is 'tattoo artist'."

"Pretentious much? Where did this bright idea originate?"

"Happenstance," Thea said through gritted teeth.

"I'm putting the kettle back on," Sherlock said after a pause. "Do you have any biscuits? You must. Munchies and so forth?"

"Top shelf," Thea sighed.

()

Three months after Sherlock's funeral, Thea had decided the best way to go about grieving was to go through as many popular methods of grieve as she could

until she found one that worked for her. Up until that point, she had been clamped into a vice of her own design in an effort to keep it together and it wasn't

doing her any favours.

In the mornings, instead of giving in to the tears welling inside her like a tidal wave, she would get up, make her bed and descent the stairs to drink tea with

John. She would hold her tears in on the way to school and during first period, until she felt so ill she'd spent most of her first break in the bathroom throwing

up. She would then proceed to not cry until she would vomit again after dinner, with the shower running in order to not freak out John. This strategy was not

working terribly well. After twelve weeks of not mourning, Thea was getting so skinny she herself was noticing it and she was exhibiting what google told her

were tell-tale ailments of seasoned bulimics. It was, in a nutshell, not the way to go.

Thea spent nights on the internet – studiously avoiding the sites devoted to nutters theorising about her father's demise – educating herself in the art of

mourning.

The first thing she attempted was an old-fashioned wailing session on the graveyard. Thea tore her hair, beat her chest and screamed until her throat was

raw. It took a total of ten minutes for her uncle to appear by her side, bearing a packet of sedatives and sporting a completely disconcerted expression.

"I'm wailing," Thea sobbed hoarsely, unable to turn of the waterworks. It turned out that starting to cry was a lot easier that stopping. "They…they s-say it's

good fo-fo-for emotional re-lease."

"Do they," Mycroft took her by the elbow and attempted to steer her towards the waiting car, idling illegally on the path reserved for hearses only.

Thea wrenched herself from his grasp and threw herself onto the grave, clawing at the ground, pressing her face into the earth and screaming.

"Making a spectacle of yourself won't ease any of your pain," her uncle grunted as he pulled her up. "You're having a nervous breakdown, Alethea…please, let

me-"

"I'm researching," she screeched. "This is a scientific inquiry!"

Mycroft took a deep breath and manhandled his kicking and screaming niece into the back of the car. Thea suddenly felt boneless and soft, ceased her

caterwauling and slumped into the leather seat. Her face was gritty with dirt. She licked her lips and swallowed.

"This kind of behaviour will see you committed," her uncle said softly, handing her a handkerchief.

"Carrying a cloth handkerchief in this day and age is not the mark of sanity either," she replied weakly.

()

While the wailing had not been something Thea considered as a regular practise, she had been unable to shake the feeling that the earth she had swallowed

in the process had somehow comfortingly settled in the gaping wound inside her. A routine of fortnightly visits to the grave, varying in length but never

exceeding ten minutes, established itself seemingly without her doing – just long enough to consume a small taste of dirt and contemplate how much of

Sherlock's essence had seeped into the ground by now.

Over the next weeks Thea grieved in a great many ways.

She broke into the Baker Street flat – unnecessarily, Mrs Hudson would have welcomed her with open arms, but Thea preferred the mission to go unnoticed –

and collected one of Sherlock's suits, his second best robe and the folder of his compositions.

She slept in her father's shirt. She covered his suit jacket in badges and wore it every day. She made a pillow case out of his robe. She played the music he had

written in the basement until her fingers bled. None of it made her feel any better.

After reading about the healing power of happy memories, Thea had sat down on her bed one Saturday morning and ventured into her castle. She'd unlocked

the heavy door protecting Sherlock's wing of the structure.

 _"Do you want me to read you a story, Spawn?"_

Memories of her father reading to her were only the tip of the iceberg, yet when John forced her back into the real world, by pouring a glass of freezing water

over her head, Thea was astonished to find it was nine in the evening – and they'd only just started on _Around the World in 80 Days._

The castle became something of a problem after this.

Thea could simply not stay out of Sherlock's wing. The temptation to stay holed up with him at his most accommodating and patient was irresistible.

It was, in fact, so irresistible, it stopped everything.

Her school counsellor called John to report Thea had gone into some kind of trance and could not be moved from her desk. John arrived, repeated the water

ritual and took her home, only to find she had disappeared again within moments of entering the house. When Thea had not moved for fifteen hours, he called

Mycroft, who laid down the law.

"You don't understand," Thea muttered.

"I do very much understand," Mycroft countered. "But it is unhealthy."

"I don't care."

"We cannot allow you to do this," her uncle said softly. "Quite aside from the fact that you would die of dehydration within a week unless we had you put on a

drip, you know – you _know_ – that you are creating a false idol by revelling in idyllic memories only. It's a discredit to your father's memory, Alethea. He wouldn't

want you to remember him as a paragon of love and light."

Aside from her wailing performance at the cemetery, the silent tears sliding down Thea's cheeks were the first she'd allowed her uncle to see.

"I don't know if I can stop."

"You do not need to stop." Mycroft sank down on the couch next to her. "This is a perfect opportunity to discipline your mind and practise the art of

moderation."

Half an hour.

Trial and error taught Thea that after thirty minutes she would be in too deep to extract herself without help. The eggtimers were purchased and a routine was

put in place. Every morning Thea would permit herself half an hour with Sherlock in her castle, alternating between memories in the category 'warm and fuzzy'

and 'noir'. It kept her out of the nuthouse, but it did very little in terms of making her feel better.

Experimenting, she thought, might make her feel closer to her father. It turned out to be frustrating more than anything, because everything she could do on

her own was boring and it made her feel his absence even more keenly.

Then, six months after the fall, Lisa turned eighteen and went to get a tattoo.

()

"A mermaid?" Thea asked sceptically. "You don't even like mermaids."

"Aha," Lisa smiled. "My sister did though. It's to commemorate her."

"What…are you in danger of forgetting?"

Lisa rolled her eyes.

"No, Thea. People get tattoos for their loved ones all the time. It's about having something that makes you think of them as close to you as possible. All the

time. Something that can't be taken away. A permanent tribute. It's sentimental. And it will make my parents flip their lid, added bonus."

They were standing outside a tattooing establishment called _Pretty in Ink_.

"Is it not going to be horrifically painful?"

"Probably," Lisa said tetchily. "But that's part of the process, isn't it. You endure a little pain and it takes a bigger pain away."

"Will it?"

"Ideally."

"Are you still in a lot of…pain?" Thea frowned up at her friend. "I mean, your sister's been dead for years and years."

Lisa looked as though she might shout at Thea for a moment, then her face softened to the point of tears.

"It's not as awful as it was," she said. "But I don't think it ever stops hurting entirely. Sorry."

Thea sighed deeply, the hedgehog in her chest tensing and pricking her sternum.

"Right." Lisa straightened up. "I'm going in. If you want to come still, now is the time."

Thea followed Lisa inside and was charmed by the humming of the machines immediately. They were like benign dentist drills. Like the tiny circular saws used to open craniums. Soothing. Infinitely soothing.

"Oh, you look dreadfully underage." They turned and were faced with a square man sporting a circus director's moustache behind the counter.

"That's only fifty percent correct," Thea said lamely. "And I'm merely here for moral support. Surely there's no law saying I can't be in here provided you don't

touch me and I don't smoke any of the rock your co-worker has stashed in her ridiculous hairdo."

"You what- Heather!"

The moustached man turned and glared at a young woman with a towering beehive bent studiously over an exposed leg, etching the outline of a dramatically

splayed kraken.

"What?" she snapped without looking up.

"Are you holding?"

Poor Heather was too slow to reply for her answer to carry any sort of authority.

"You can finish that and piss off," Mr Moustache said. "Seriously, man. We've talked about this. Do what you want in your spare time but you're not bringing

that kind of bollocks into my house. This is a place of work, Heather. Bloody work."

Heather stood, unleashed a string of spectacular obscenities and stormed out the back door. The man with the half-finished kraken sat up.

"Keep your hair on," Mr Moustache said before the abandoned customer could even open his mouth. "I'll finish you up in a minute. It'll be better work anyway.

Just lay down. Relax. Would you like a cup of tea?"

"Oh, yea?"

"You there, tiny narc," Mr Moustache waggled his hand at Thea. "See that kitchen over yonder?"

"Obviously."

"Go put the kettle on."

Thea shrugged and wandered over to the immaculately clean kitchen in the corner. She put the kettle on and set out four cups.

"Milk, sugar, lemon?" she called over her shoulder.

"Black three sugars," Mr Moustache called back. "Eli here will have white no sugar."

Thea made tea and by the time she returned Lisa was pouring over a book filled with photographs of nautical tattoos.

"You should get a mermaid with big teeth," Thea said over her shoulder.

"You should shut up," Lisa smirked.

Mr Moustache was attending to the kraken and was making remarkably short work of it. Thea brought over the remaining two teacups and set them on an

empty bench.

"Thank you," Mr Moustache murmured.

Twenty minutes later Eli and his kraken shape went and Lisa took his place to receive an entirely too cutesy mermaid on her left flank.

"What's your name?" Mr Moustache asked as Thea settled in on a bar stool to Lisa's right.

"Thea." She was watching him unpack fresh needles and little tubs of ink with rapt fascination.

"I'm Mr Samson."

Thea nodded absentmindedly. Mr Samson's arms were covered with intricate geometrical patterns, rendered in tiny dots, running from his cuticles all the way

up his arms, disappearing into his checked shirtsleeves. Probably went all the way to his shoulders.

"How'd you know about Heather?"

"Dunno," Thea said, blowing into her tea, swinging her legs.

"Thea's got a gift," Lisa said with her best cryptic smile as he applied a sort of temporary tattoo to her selected spot.

"Handy."

"So many shades of grey," Thea said, still marvelling at his arms.

Mr Samson looked up and smiled at her.

"Good, hey?"

"Extraordinary."

"I've got a guy up in Glasgow, he's a true artist. His greys make the rainbow look dull."

"Someone makes these?"

"No, I scrape some pigeon shite off a windowsill and mix it with water. Of course someone makes them."

"How about brown?"

"How'd you mean?" Mr Samson had snapped fresh gloves on and was starting on the mermaid's tail.

"How many shades of brown do you carry?"

"Interesting you should ask-"

"Oh, buggering fuck!" Lisa yelped. "Oh. Oh. Thea. Hand!"

Thea reached over and took Lisa's outstretched hand, grunting as her friend clamped down on her for dear life.

"Brown's a little bit neglected, I feel." Mr Samson moved steadily over Lisa's quivering flank, wiping and patting small rivulets of blood and ink away. "Which is

sad, because the whole sepia thing is coming back into fashion. In six months all the Sailor Jerry hipsters are going to ask for skin tones, I guarantee."

"How do you know?"

"I've got a gift too, little Thea."

"Brown is lame," Lisa said through gritted teeth.

"There's no such thing as brown, Lisa," Thea said dreamily.

Mr Samson smirked and started on the scales. Lisa shrieked and Thea closed her eyes, listening to the hum of the tattoo gun.

()

When Sherlock had been gone for ten months, Thea went to visit Mr Samson. She went the roundabout way – leaving her school building via the back exit just

as a van delivering linen to the hospital across the road was blocking the CCTV. It wouldn't do to have her uncle dispatch a posse to make sure Mr Samson

kept his needles away.

"Why if it isn't Thea, the tiny narc," he said pleasantly when she closed the door behind her.

"Good morning, Mr Samson. I was wondering if you might spare me a moment of your valuable time." Thea put on her politest smile.

The shop was empty, which wasn't a huge surprise at 9 am on a Monday morning.

"Not without personal permission from your parents – and I mean _in person_."

"I'm not here for work…well, I'm kind of here for work but not that kind of work," Thea fumbled. "It's more about my work than yours – no, I mean…come on, it's

not like you've got anything else on."

"I shouldn't have bothered coming in at this hour, admittedly." Mr Samson surveyed the silent shop and shrugged.

"You can hardly call walking from the back room to the front _coming in_ ," Thea said.

Mr Samson cocked his head at her.

"You're wearing slippers." Thea nodded at his feet. "But you're not wearing socks. It's miserable outside, you'd have worn socks if you'd left the house. And

even _if_ you would have bothered changing your shoes for slippers when you got in – which would be highly inefficient considering this is not footwear in

accordance with your health and safety regulations, so you'd have to change them again if a customer came in – you wouldn't have taken your socks off. These

are crap slippers, their lining provides nothing a sock doesn't. Therefore you slept on the sofa bed you keep for customers who can't hack the pain and need a

lie down in the back room. Like you've done every night since your beloved chucked you out because he needs someone less married to his work."

Mr Samson simply looked at her for a while.

"Okay, I see what Mermaid girl was on about now," he said finally. "How'd you know my beloved was a he?"

"I didn't," Thea admitted. "But if he hadn't been you'd have taken the trouble to correct me – if I'd said 'she' instead you'd have just let it slide because it's

none of my business."

"Oh, that's pretty good," Mr Samson grinned with genuine appreciation. "Still, no ink for you."

"Are you that hung over?" Thea snapped. "I'm not here for a tattoo, I'm here about the brown shades."

"What on earth are you talking about?"

In lieu of an answer, Thea pulled up her jumper and revealed her midriff.

"Where'd you get that done?" Mr Samson asked. "It's wonky as all get out."

"I did that," Thea told the top of his pomaded head. "And I'm aware it's a tad uneven."

"A tad. Where'd you get the colours?" Mr Samson's nose was almost touching her belly. "They're nice."

"I made those."

"How do you mean?"

"I made all of them."

"Sorry, I meant, where'd you buy the pigment?"

"Christ alive, are you not listening?" Thea rolled her eyes. "I _made_ the pigment."

"Bollocks."

Thea dropped her jumper, took off her backpack and produced a fat ring binder.

"Processes," she said, holding it out to Mr Samson.

"What are you?" He flicked through the folder, expression wavering between rather impressed and utterly freaked out.

"I needed a project."

"So you've permanently covered your stomach in shades of the world's least popular colour?"

"I hear it's about to experience a renaissance," Thea said smoothly.

"We _do_ need to talk." Mr Samson stood and made for the kitchen. "Cuppa?"

"Please."

()

On his journey back to the table, bearing tea and a packet of scotch fingers, Sherlock's eyes snagged on a stack of spiral notebooks.

"May I?" he asked.

Thea nodded. Her father was clearly aware that he was still on exceedingly thin ice, otherwise he would have torn into the books without so much as a glance

to check it was okay. He brought the top three notebooks with him to the table and flicked the first one open.

"You never used to enjoy drawing much," he said pensively.

"Some intermediate skill is required if you want to work in a tattoo parlour," Thea pointed out. "I'm improving."

"This is awfully nautical."

"Trends."

Sherlock set her 'Sailor Jerry' practise pad aside and flicked open the next.

"Lettering?" he groaned.

"It's strangely meditative."

"How do you not go mad with boredom?"

"Forty thousand types of tobacco ash," Thea said wryly.

"Shaky comparison," her father muttered and opened the last book. "Oh my."

"Yea," Thea said with an involuntary smile. "My anchors may be average, but I was always quite good at geometry."

The third notebook was half full with designs not unlike the work Mr Samson had on his arms. It was intricate and fiddly, endless, intertwined mandalas of dots

and dashes. Sherlock turned the pages and snorted a laugh.

"Is that intentional?" he asked, holding up a page with an unfolding lotus shape comprised of zeroes and ones.

"Obviously," Thea said with a grin. The zeroes and ones spelled the word 'bollocks' over and over in binary code.

"Would that not be unethical?" Her father smiled back. "Marring someone permanently with profanity?"

"No more unethical than giving them the one-millionth Chinese character for 'courage' or 'patience' or 'strength'. And it's highly improbable anyone would ever

notice."

"These are interesting. And…uhm…appealing."

"D'you want one?"

Sherlock's head snapped up and he stared at his daughter with a genuine expression of horror. Thea broke into giggles.

"I'm joking."

Her father rolled his eyes.

"This is difficult for me," he said suddenly. "I can't promise I won't mock you. I can't even confidently say that I won't be a downright arse about this at times."

"Shocking surprise," Thea said drily.

"Your mind is made up, I take it?"

"Quite so."

"I suppose it's no harder to accept than, say, someone disappearing without so much as a farewell for a lengthy period of time."

"Shaky comparison."

"Fair enough."

Thea took a deep breath.

"You can mock me," she said. "It won't change my decision."

"That's comforting to hear." Sherlock closed the notepad and looked at Thea with a crooked smile. "We can have those generational disagreements other

parents and teenagers seem to be so prone to."

"Sounds marvellous."

"Should we maybe go get chips now, Spawn?"

A few moments ticked by. The hedgehog was still there, bristling and grunting inside Thea's chest. But it did seem a little hungry.

"Diseased calamari rings, too?" she asked.

"Two dozen if you want."

"Yea," Thea said, pushing her chair back. "Okay."


	14. Intervention

4

They left the house stealthily, to the sounds of Mary singing along to some awful power ballad in the kitchen as she was burning sausages, and walked

towards the chippie.

Thea had some vague thought about starting up some kind of conversation but didn't really know where to begin…anyhow, she was enthralled by the mere act

of walking with her father before she could really apply herself to coming up with anything worthwhile. The rustle of his coat, the crisp splats of his shoes on

the wet pavement, the angles of his elbows as he rammed his hands into his pockets. It was as though no time had passed at all, save for the fact that Thea

was keeping pace with his long strides practically without jogging. Thea had shot up substantially in the last two years, some of it she put down to John's

insistence on regular meals and his obsession with nutritional values, and while Sherlock still had a solid head on her it still made for an interesting change in

perspective.

She'd had recurring dreams about her father all through his absence, the most frequent one being her own breathless hurrying as she followed him through

crowded streets with her eyes fixed on his lower back, terrified to lose sight of him and end up lost. Walking with him now was no different from walking with

Marcus or John or anyone. To get chips. Thea smiled.

There was a faint beeping noise and Sherlock withdrew his phone from his pocket without breaking stride.

"What?" he asked and a moment later said: "I see. When?"

His other hand emerged from the coat and rose in a smooth motion as Sherlock rotated towards the street still walking, a taxi swerved and stopped at the

curb and Sherlock, now unleashing rapid fire questions upon his caller, opened its door, slid inside and was gone.

For a moment Thea stood stunned.

The cab threaded back into traffic and moved forward steadily.

"Are you fucking serious?" Thea screamed, bent down, picked up an empty beer bottle abandoned on the footpath and hurled it after the taxi with all her

might.

Her aim was as awful as her arm was strong. The bottle sailed clear across the four lanes of traffic and shattered only a few feet from a group of youths

smoking in the bus shelter on the other side of the street.

"Oi, ya fucking-" They were on their feet and halfway on the road with remarkable speed.

"Come on then," Thea roared, kicking the street light in front of her, arms spread wide in invitation. "Whatcha gonna do, pricks?"

It was like being charged by bison. Thea leapt up as the first one came at her in an effort to avoid a punch to the face, only to be tackled around the waist,

taking his bony shoulder right into her gut. Winded, she clawed at his shirt, exposing his back and digging her nails in above his hips. The boy grunted and

promptly slammed her down to the ground. There was just enough time to kick out at his ankles once – and miss – before Thea curled up into a ball to protect

herself as three sets of trainers assaulted her from various angles. They got her kidneys a couple of times and there was a particularly painful stomp to her hip,

but it was over as fast as it had begun when the bus pulled up at the shelter and her assailants ran off to resume their scheduled evening activities.

Groaning, Thea pushed herself into a sitting position and leaned against the lamp post. She dug into her pocket and retrieved a squashed though otherwise

unharmed joint. After two deep drags, she had summoned up the courage to examine her ribcage for cracks or breaks and lift her shirt to check out the

damage to her hip. It was already sporting some marvellous colour and was sure to make operating the hi-hat pedal a decidedly non-fun activity.

After three drags she managed a smirk.

"Ridiculous evening," she muttered.

After four drags, a car pulled up on the curb beside her and before Thea could finish saying "For the love of fuck…" the entire street was reverberating with the

wrath of Mycroft Holmes.

"Is there really no act of hooliganism that you consider beneath you?"

Thea flicked the joint into the gutter with annoying precision – where had that been when she really needed it – and attempted to stand.

"Yes, by all means, aggravate your internal bleeding," Mycroft hissed. "Splendid idea, seeing as I've nothing better to do than play nursemaid to your contrived

and unoriginal impersonation of an unruly adolescent."

"I'm not bleeding internally," Thea sighed, then eyed him suspiciously. "Am I?"

"Put your hands on the ground," her uncle ordered.

Thea rolled her eyes but did as he said. She doubted there was any serious injury but it was better to be safe than sorry. Her uncle's hands were dry and

smooth as they tapped over her abdomen.

"Any pain?" he snapped.

"A bit," she growled back.

"Six or higher?"

"Probably no- ouch! Jesus fucking Christ, uncle My-"

"What in the world is that?" Mycroft barked and Thea felt the cold evening air on her exposed midriff. Ah. Bother.

"Is this permanent?"

"Yea." Thea could feel a grin spreading across her face without any of her doing and struggled valiantly to contain it.

Mycroft took her elbow and yanked her to a standing position, suddenly completely without concern for her physical wellbeing, which boded well in terms of

internal injuries.

"I am taking you home."

"It's just round the corner," Thea said, chewing the insides of her cheeks to keep her mirth in check. "I can walk."

"My home," Mycroft specified.

"No. Why? No. Piss off. I'm not coming. Why?"

"Treatment."

"What treatment? I'm fine. John's a doctor." Giggles were threatening.

"Tea then," her uncle barked.

"There's tea at mine," Thea snorted.

"Just because your father has just accomplished a level of imbecility worthy of the Guinness Book does not mean you get to opt out of the family entirely."

Mycroft moved Thea towards the idling vehicle. "I am your uncle and you will have a cup of tea and possibly a biscuit with me. At gunpoint if need be, but have

it you will."

Thea starting laughing so hard it was impossible to resist Mycroft as he bundled her into the back of her car.

Mycroft's handgun lay on the table between the teapot and a plate of Jaffa cakes.

"I hate these," Thea said through a mouthful of chocolate and orange goo.

"Yet you are eating them at a competitive rate."

"Duality of man." Thea shrugged and shoved another biscuit into her mouth. "Take it up with Jung, I'm only embracing my enslavement to human nature."

Her uncle watched her, his fingertips resting together in an entirely too Sherlocky fashion, his eyebrows knitted ever so slightly.

"Yes?" Thea asked finally. "No. Let me see…may I?"

Mycroft nodded almost imperceptibly.

"You're appalled," Thea stated. "You're horrified because I have chosen to embrace a culture you care very little for and consider intellectually lazy. I have

defiled my body, though thankfully only in places covered by clothing, and it distresses you because you don't understand the purpose and it therefore

amounts to self-mutilation in your eyes. And here I am, mildly stoned, despite the fact that I have seen what drug abuse can do to even the most brilliant of

minds, following right in my father's footsteps. You're so disappointed you could hit me. But all that disgust and disapproval and disappointment is nothing

compared to the soul crushing guilt of having abandoned me to a situation that has reduced me – who held such promise – to a Gordic knot of issues. First your

only brother, now your only niece…how _upsetting_."

For a moment her uncle simply regarded her with his trademark cool appraising gaze.

"What's become of you?" he asked finally.

"Don't catastrophise," Thea dismissed him.

"Your father-"

"My father," Thea interrupted, "had a semi-massive smack habit. There is no feasible comparison and you know it."

"You are deliberately diminishing your greatest asset." Mycroft's gaze hardened to a stare.

"Incorrect. I am deliberately facilitating a change of perspective and activating neural pathways which usually remain dormant."

"Now where have I heard that before…" Her uncle leaned forward slightly, eyes drilling into her. "That rings strangely familiar to 'I'm not an addict, I'm a user',

wouldn't you say?"

Thea huffed.

"For all your remarkable intelligence you're spectacularly ignorant," she said. "You left me to my own devices and I dealt with things as best as I could. Now, I

suggest you get off my case. I'm no longer your business, remember?"

"Perhaps I should have words with Dr Watson, whose business you very much have been," Mycroft said menacingly. "I'm frankly astonished that he has

permitted you to join the ranks of the degenerates. Even a simple creature like him should have had the wherewithal to put a stop to this."

"My god," Thea groaned. "You'd think I was shooting up into my eyeballs. There is no discernible difference between my spliff and your bedtime whiskey - so

unless you're about to enter a ten-step program yourself, back off. And leave John out of it, too, he'd really doing his best."

Now it was Mycroft's turn to groan.

"You are being wilfully obtuse." He pinched the bridge of his nose. "And you seem to have transferred your unconditional loyalty from one oaf to the next."

"Am not," Thea groused and almost giggled at how petulant she sounded. "And John's not an oaf."

"How sweet," Mycroft snapped. "Now, as for your inappropriate comparison. You are a child, I am an adult. Alcohol is not an illegal substance, marijuana is. My

indulging in a finger of malt when I get the chance of an evening's peace is not going to perforate my grey matter-"

"Are you telling me in all seriousness that you have never taken a single puff of a joint?" Thea interrupted.

"Of course not."

"Of course you're not telling me that or of course you have never?"

"The latter." Her uncle's voice was tense with exasperation. "Diversions popular among the less witty of the goldfish are unbecoming for someone operating on

our standard. You-"

"Not even in school?" Thea was staring at him in disbelief. "Not even when you were away at university?"

"No."

"Well." Thea leaned back and took up her teacup. "Well. Well, well, well."

"Repeat 'well' once more and I shall have you enrolled in a Swiss finishing school before dawn."

"It certainly explains why you are spouting all that hogwash about perforated, rotting brain cells," Thea said calmly. "You, sir, of all people, should be aware

that one can never judge accurately from a subjective position."

"Are you suggesting that my opinion on your drug use is moot because I have never partaken myself?" Mycroft asked incredulously.

"That," Thea answered with a friendly smile, "is exactly what I am suggesting. In fact, I'm not even suggesting. I'm stating. You don't know anything about

anything, therefore, you should shut up."

"How dare you-"

"No, how dare _you_?" Thea cut him off. "For once you are the layman in the room, accept it. And take my word for it, uncle, my brain is just dandy."

For a while they sipped tea in bristling silence. Thea forced herself to keep her eyes from straying towards her uncle, leaving him to process in peace. Mycroft

was an insufferable know-it-all, literally, and applied crushing expectations to the intellects of his nearest and dearest; however, Thea had to credit him, he

was mostly a fair player and currently fully aware that she had made a valid point.

"I could never dissuade your father from his forays into that particular sphere of awareness," he said finally in a voice Thea did not entirely recognise. "It's

been a frequent source of…pain."

"Pain?" Thea asked, thinking she might have misheard.

"Yes."

It struck Thea that this kind of admission would have prompted most people into supplying hugs and words of comfort. Yet at the same time she was overcome

by a completely different impulse.

"May I propose a deal?" she asked.

Mycroft gave her a tired look.

"Try once," Thea said. "Smoke with me, just one time. If you still think it's detrimental to anything afterwards, I'll heed your advise."

Her uncle raised an eyebrow ever so slightly.

"I won't go back on my end of the bargain," Thea said earnestly. "Guaranteed. Scouts' honour and all that jazz."

"Very well," Mycroft said after a moment.

" _Really_?" Thea practically squealed.

"Yes, Alethea, really." Mycroft closed his eyes and sighed the sigh of the terminally weary. "You people exhaust me. I've had the guest bedroom made up for

you. Can I trust you not to climb out of the window?"

Thea nodded. Truth be told, she was knackered and her battered transport was in dire need of rest.

"I'll text John," she yawned. "He worries when I don't come home."

"How…ordinary."

"Yea, it's nice." Thea hefted herself from the comfort of the armchair. "Good night."

"Sweet dopaminergic activations."

Thea smiled and went to bed.


	15. On the Roof Pt1

Thea managed to drag her bruised remains into her uncle's sitting room at 11.17 am on the dot.

"You've missed breakfast," Mycroft announced from behind his laptop, typing out an impressive staccato.

"I prefer brunch," Thea yawned. "What are you still doing here? Is the home office the home office now?"

"Feeble pun at best," her uncle replied. "And no, I am in fact about to leave. I was waiting for you."

"Why?"

"You mean, of course, to say: _Apologies for being so inconsiderate as to make you wait, uncle Mycroft._ "

"I meant, in fact, to say: why?" Thea spotted a coffee pot and poured herself a cup.

"Which is taller, One Canada Square or the Scalpel?" Mycroft asked.

"Canada Square." Thea shoveled sugar into her coffee and stirred, "By 45.9 metres, as you well know."

"You'll meet me in the lobby at sunset." Mycroft shut the laptop, stood and reached for the umbrella leaning on the settee.

"I will, will I?"

"Yes. You will bring cannabis and you will be discreet about it."

Thea nearly spat her coffee back into the cup.

"Repeat after me," she said once she had stopped laughing. "Bring some puff."

Mycroft winced.

"I will say no such thing," he said wearily. "I will wait for you precisely ten minutes, if you fail to make our appointment our agreement will be null and void."

Thea arrived at Canary Wharf a full hour before sunset. She spent three-quarters of an hour people watching, practicing her deductions half-heartedly and skim

reading a paperback copy of _American Psycho_.

The moment the sun touched the skyline she rose and made her way to the mammoth structure that was One Canada Square. When Mycroft's car slowed to a hold

out front, Thea opened his door before her uncle had even uncrossed his legs.

"Naturally," he sighed. "Incapable of arriving within the hour for an evening meal, but a paragon of punctuality when it comes to diminishing your already insufficient

wits."

Thea looked up at him eagerly as he straightened his jacket.

"What?" he snapped.

"So? Have you got a secret pleasure den in there or what?"

"Don't be preposterous." Mycroft strode into the building with purpose, Thea hot on his heels.

"There's an empty floor they're remodeling," Thea announced.

"Certainly not." Mycroft pressed the elevator call button on the lift labelled GL37.

"There's a dead level."

"Are you actively pursuing the status of complete imbecile?"

They stepped into the elevator, Mycroft swiped a key card over a scanner and pressed a button labelled M.

"Tell me the M doesn't stand for Mycroft," Thea giggled.

"Are you inebriated already?" her uncle hissed. "Because that would completely defy the point of this exercise."

"Which is?"

"To dissuade you from continuing your descent into drug induced idiocy." Mycroft massaged the bridge of his nose. "And to embark on this ludicrous journey on even

footing, as much as that is possible."

"I'm not stoned," Thea said truthfully, " _yet_ – oh my God, we're going to the roof!"

"Saints alive, that took you a minute," Mycroft muttered as the lift came to a silent stop.

They exited into the maintenance hub, housed in a gigantic glass pyramid. Mycroft led Thea past machinery, computer terminals and rows and rows of boxes; swiped

his card against a keypad by a door and one step later Thea was looking down on… everything really.

For a few moments, Thea and Mycroft simply stood side by side at the balustrade surrounding the pyramid; one awestruck the other with an air of complete

nonchalance.

"You're showing off, uncle," Thea said finally.

"I find that once in a while a little grandness is appropriate. We shan't make it a habit, is that understood?"

"I'm aware." Thea looked around. "Where shall we make camp?"

"Right this way."

On the far side off the roof, the side overlooking the river and, if you squinted, the edge of the sea, sat two plastic folding chairs and two upturned plastic crates.

"Aw, footstools," Thea exclaimed. "Rad!"

"If you begin an expression, you should have the grace to struggle all the way to its end," her uncle said as he lowered himself into a chair, hooked the umbrella to

the edge of the balustrade and reclined as comfortably as possible. "So, what's the customary procedure?"

Thea settled herself next to him and withdrew one of a significant number of pre-rolled joints from her inside pocket. She lit it, inhaled pensively and passed it on to

her uncle.

"The crustimony proceedcake," she said through a mouthful of smoke, "is to partake and converse."

She watched as Mycroft dutifully took a drag, then another; a scene that rivalled her father's return from the dead in surrealism.

"About?" he asked.

"Anything at all," Thea accepted the joint and blew smoke out over the city.

"That is one of the most useless conversation starters of all time."

"True. We can play a game until inspiration strikes, if you'd care for it."

"A game?" Although Mycroft's tone was no less superior and borderline bored than usual, Thea detected a vague note of interest. One could accuse her uncle of being

a cold-blooded scheduler of executions, but there was no rightful basis to claim that he didn't like to play games.

"Historic roulette?" Thea offered, knowing full well this was one of her uncle's guilty pleasures.

"You brought dice?" he asked.

"You're not the only one to put some thought into making this a special occasion." Thea withdrew five dice from her backpack's side pocket. "We shan't make it a

habit, of course. Now, century limitations?"

"To give you a fighting chance-"

"Oh, don't you worry about me," Thea interrupted. "I'll have you know I got a first in my history A-level."

"That's sweet," Mycroft sneered. "As I said, to give you a fighting chance, we'll curb it at the 1600s."

"Age before beauty?"

"Ladies first."

Thea rolled. 6-4-2-1-4.

"12th of June 1644," Mycroft said immediately. "Siege and capture of Liverpool by Henry Tillier's regiment."

"21st of April 1664," Thea countered. "The House of Commons suggests it's a great idea to go to war with the Dutch."

"That's not strictly correct," her uncle pointed out, accepting the proffered joint gracefully.

"Well, it seemed to be the general consensus that that's what they were saying…" Thea passed him the dice.

"Better than nothing, I suppose," Mycroft conceded. "Half-points."

"Pedant."

Mycroft rolled. 5-2-1-2-1.

"Bloody Sunday!" Thea shouted.

"Excuse me?" Mycroft sputtered. "Bloody Sunday is out of bounds."

"Not the Irish one, the Russian one!" Thea did a little victory dance in her chair.

"Irish, Russian _and_ Turkish – you cannot assemble any of these dates," her uncle insisted.

"22nd January 1905." Thea glared at him.

"Two-two-one-five," Mycroft extended a finger for each number. "You used four of five dice."

"Two-two-one- _one_ -nine-zero-five," Thea droned back. "I carried the second one."

"I think not."

"Are you serious?"

"Yes. Also, Christmas Day-"

"Oh, fuck's sake…" Thea smacked her forehead, a rush of shame washing over her.

"Language. Christmas Day, 1810," her uncle went on unperturbed, "first public appearance of Santa Claus in the United States."

Thea rummaged in her pocket for a second joint.

"Is that wise?" Mycroft asked when she lit and passed it.

"Clearly you're still in full possession of your faculties," she remarked drily.

"Your roll."

Thea rolled. 6-1-3-5-1.

"Apropos 'crustimony proceedcake'." Mycroft shook his head.

"I _know._ That is wild."

"Will you do the honours?"

"31st January 1956," she said. "Death of A. A. Milne."

"I am genuinely astonished," Mycroft admitted.

"Me, too." Thea smiled. "Does that make you believe in coincidence?"

"Don't you start." Mycroft seemed to get lost in the view for a moment. "My mouth is dry," he stated suddenly.

"That would be what we in the business call 'dry mouth'", Thea said helpfully. "Would you like a cup of tea?"

Mycroft raised an eyebrow. Thea opened her backpack and withdrew a thermos, a fine china cup and saucer wrapped in a tea towel, and a packet of scotch fingers.

She poured Mycroft's tea in the cup and her own into the thermos' lid, then dug a sachet of sugar from the depth of her jacket.

"Thank you," Mycroft said quietly.

For a while uncle and niece sat, sipping in silence, occasionally tapping one another on the arm to pass the joint back and forth.

"Alethea."

"Yes, uncle?"

"Why are we doing this?"

"Because you agreed to it and I'm quietly confident it will be memorably hilarious."

"Yes, thank you, oracle of the obvious," Mycroft snapped. "Last I saw you, you announced that communications were suspended indefinitely."

"Did you take me seriously?"

"Not initially," her uncle admitted.

"But eventually?"

"Once your father started to exhibit signs of genuine despair…yes."

"Genuine despair? Spare me." Thea threw the butt off the building and for a fraction of a second both her and Mycroft winced. "He left me behind without a seconds'

thought yesterday night, after stalking me for weeks it took exactly one phone call to distract him. He's not despairing, uncle, he was just bored."

"Where were you going?"

"To get chips." Thea ripped open the scotch fingers violently.

"Chips," Mycroft scoffed. "The only thing that culinary heathen ever fed you was chips. The only thing to safe you from morbid obesity was that he'd feed you so

infrequently."

"I like chips."

"You,", her uncle pointed a scotch finger at her, "are like a garbage disposal."

"Did you have any feelings about me not speaking to you anymore?" Thea asked.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Never mind."

"Do you think me a complete monster?"

Thea looked over at Mycroft, uncertain whether or not she was imagining an odd strain in his voice.

"I shall only say this once more," he said. "I understand that the course of action your father and I decided upon has caused you extraordinary emotional hardship.

But it simply had to be done. Watching you grieve was almost unbearable. But it simply had to be endured. If you are firm on your decision to no longer speak to me,

this evening excepted, I again will simply have to endure it."

"Huh."

In front of them the spectacle of London lights continued as though the fabric of possibility had not just ripped apart.

"Are you fishing for an apology, Alethea?"

"I'm not sure," Thea whispered.

"I cannot ask your forgiveness," Mycroft said softly. "Asking the impossible is for idealists and similar idiots."

A helicopter passed over them.

"Well," Thea said when the noise of the rotor blades had faded away, "you are an idiot. Occasionally. Maybe. A little."


End file.
